Robots Move from Pancakes to Whiteboards

Remember that pancake flipping robot we posted about last year? The same researchers are still investigating upper-body kinesthetic teaching in robots and a reader let us know about the latest results:

The team of researchers from Italy and Japan, lead by Dr. Petar Kormushev, has taught a Japanese humanoid robot how to clean a whiteboard. The approach that the team developed is called "upper-body kinesthetic teaching", and can be applied to a wide variety of vertical surface related tasks, such as window cleaning, wall painting, wallpaper fitting, drawing on a wall, etc.

The new research will be presented at the upcoming International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in May of 2011 in Shanghai, China. If you just can't wait to read the research, you're in luck because the paper is already online: Upper-body Kinesthetic Teaching of a Free-standing Humanoid Robot (PDF format).

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Ephaptic Coupling in Brain Offers New Understanding

Mimicking the human brain may be even harder than expected. For decades researchers have attempted to decode the inner workings of our grey matter and much progress has been made in the area of neural networks, but recent work by neuroscientists at Caltech are offering yet another mechanism crucial to brain function - ephaptic coupling. It was once thought that neural processing was performed entirely via synapses (junctions between neurons), but now it's believed that information is also transmitted through extracellular electric fields throughout the brain. This epiphenomenon allows groups of neurons to influence each other without physical connection complicating our understanding of this remarkable machine. Of course this also raises new questions about the effects of external electrical fields on our thinking processes.

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Keepon finally for sale

The funny yellow dancing robot KeepOn of youTube fame (see above) will finally be available in a toy version. The toy version will look the same as the current research version, which is used as a telepresence tool for autism research and therapy. However, unlike the research version which is priced at 30'000 dollars (!) a piece, the toy version will retail for a mere 40 dollars. For now it's not completely clear what the toy robot will be able to do, but according to the BeatBot's press release it will maintain the reactivity to touch and its ability to listen to music, detect the beat, and dance in a perfect rhythm.

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BrainDriver - A Mind Controlled Car

Following his recent interview for the Robots Podcast, Raúl Rojas at the Freie Universität Berlin has released a video which shows a driver controlling his car using a brain interface. In the video, the driver is wearing an Emotiv EEG (Electroenzephalogram) primarily sold as a gaming device - for which it may not be an ideal fit. The work is part of the MadeInGermany project and follows previous projects such as Rojas group's Project AutoNOMOS. For more information on the "BrainDriver" and the "MadeInGermany" autonomous car, have a look at the autoNOMOS web site.

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Robots Podcast #72: Telepresence Robots

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Hummingbird NAV Flies Successfully

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An Initiative to Create an American Robotics Network

On January 22nd, Professor Henrik Christensen of Georgia Tech posed the question Are we ready for an American Robotics Network, saying that he had started a discussion regarding the organization of an American Robotics Network. He has also discussed the formation of such a network in a brief essay. In the recent blog post, he says I would like to get this underway as soon as possible to make sure that we can leverage the momentum from a National Robotics Initiative. First among the tasks to be entrusted to such an organization, he lists maintaining the roadmap and promoting it to agencies. More about Christensen, the roadmap, and the network after the break.

The roadmap, to which Professor Christensen refers, got its start in 2006, at a one-day workshop titled Science and Technology Challenges for Robotics organized by George Bekey of USC, Vijay Kumar of UPenn, and Matthew Mason of CMU. A summary report of that workshop states There was an enthusiastic response to the workshop with over 85 participants. [...] There were many volunteers who were ready to take on more responsibilities to promote the discipline. (Vijay Kumar was recently mentioned on Robots.net in connection with quadrotors cooperating on a construction project.)

Professor Christensen was a panelist at that workshop and later collaborated with Matthew Mason on an essay which summarized the state of robotics and previewed the findings of the collective effort to produce a robotics roadmap. The final report A Roadmap for US Robotics, From Internet to Robotics was presented in May, 2009, before the Congressional Robotics Caucus, however, in the effort to produce that report, the call for the formation of an American Robotics Network (9th slide) appears to have slipped to the back burner. Christensen is seeking to renew that endeavor.

Before occupying the KUKA Chair of Robotics at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, Professor Christensen was the founding Chairman of EURON, the European Robotics Research Network. He has recently been awarded the 2011 Engelberger Award for Education.

Originally found on Robotland.

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