Polish Robot Coaxes Expressiveness Out of Weird Design
From: IEEE Spectrum
July 14, 2011
We’re always impressed by how much expressiveness and emotion can be squeezed out of even the simplest robot faces if they’re cleverly done, and Emys (for “emotive head system”), a robot from the Wroclaw University of Technology in Poland, is a fantastic example.
Yeah, I didn’t entirely get all that either, but that “surprise” face is priceless. For a less, um, dramatic run-through of all of the expressions that Emys can make, there’s another video here.
Emys is part of the LIREC Project, which is a European research project that’s “exploring how to design digital and interactive companions who can develop and read emotions and act cross-platform.” In short, they’re trying to figure out how to make robots a little more fun to hang out with, by giving them some tools to tell how you’re feeling, and giving you an expressive face (of sorts) to look at.
This disembodied head also comes with a fancy wheeled Segway-style body called FLASH, and there’s even an arm. Just one arm, yeah, but that’s enough to shake hands and give a thumbs-up, and who could want anything more than that?
Byhalia Middle and High School students taking physical science and chemistry got an hour each to play with robots. The traveling road show for engineering at the University of Memphis was provided by Thomas E. Banning, assistant professor of engineering technology. The STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) program is geared toward recruiting outstanding students to the area universities and junior colleges including the University of Memphis, Banning said. He was joined by engineering student Derwin Cobb. Physical science instructor Sean McClish assists Antonio Johnson, a ninth grader, in his first lesson. Banning said the simple robots used in this road show are a small-scale model of the larger robots used in industries like the automotive industries in the state – Nissan and Toyota.
President Barack Obama loves robots. He’s invited bots to the White House and has even befriended a Japanese android. But now Obama has gone one step further: He’s decided to lead what may be a profound robotics revolution.
In a visit today to Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center, Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, a $500 million program to bring together industry, universities, and government to invest in emerging technologies that can improve manufacturing and create new businesses and jobs.
Robots are a big part of this effort. The administration’s new National Robotics Initiative seeks to advance “next generation robotics.” The focus is on robots that can work closely with humans—helping factory workers, healthcare providers, soldiers, surgeons, and astronauts to carry out tasks.
“You might not know this, but one of my responsibilities as commander-in-chief is to keep an eye on robots,” Obama quipped at the beginning of his speech. “And I’m pleased to report that the robots you manufacture here seem peaceful. At least for now.”
The National Robotics Initiative involves the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, and the Department of Agriculture, which combined will make available up to $70 million per year to fund new robotics projects.
Obama said he visited a local company, RedZone Robotics, which makes a robot that explores water and sewer pipes [photo, below]. “It is fascinating stuff,” he said. “It can go through any sewer system. It’s operated remotely by the municipal worker. It’s got a camera attached so it can film everything that it’s seeing.” Obama said the robot could potentially save cities millions in infrastructure costs and create jobs for workers to operate the robots and pore through the data collected.
I asked Dr. Henrik Christensen, a robotics professor at Georgia Tech who helped to establish the new initiative, what technical challenges they plan to attack. He explains that traditional robots are good at tasks that require precision and repetition, but to work alongside human workers the robots need to be smarter and safer.
“If we want to build a robot coworker, we need to have safer systems, new materials, better sensors and actuators,” he says.
One example is a robot that can observe a human worker performing a task—say, assembling parts of a car—and replicate that task, with the human supervising and assisting the robot if necessary. Another example is a robot that can help workers pack goods in a pallet or truck in an optimal way, to improve logistics.
The NSF, recently criticized for funding robotics projects some deemed wasteful, and the other agencies explain that a broad range of research will be funded, but with an emphasis on robotic systems as people’s “co-workers, co-inhabitants, co-explorers and co-defenders.” From the program solicitation:
This theme recognizes the emerging mechanical, electrical and software technologies that will make the next generation of robotic systems able to safely co-exist in close proximity to humans in the pursuit of mundane, dangerous, precise or expensive tasks. Co-robots will need to establish a symbiotic relationship with their human partners, each leveraging their relative strengths in the planning and performance of a task. This means, among other things, that for broad diffusion, access, and use (and hence, to achieve societal impacts), co-robots must be relatively cheap, easy to use, and available anywhere. As the US population ages and becomes more culturally and linguistically diverse, these co-robots may serve to increase the efficiency, productivity and safety of individuals in all activities and phases of life, and their ubiquitous deployment has the potential to measurably improve the state of national health, education and learning, personal and public safety, security, the character and composition of a heterogeneous workforce, and the economy, more generally.
“Our understanding of the applications of robotics technology has expanded,” says Dr. Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Robots are not just for dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs. Their greatest value is working with people.” He says that in addition to reinventing manufacturing, robots will play ever more important roles in agriculture, medicine, rehabilitation, and elder care.
And why start a new initiative when agencies are already funding cutting-edge robotics projects? Dr. Christensen of Georgia Tech says robotics research has been too fragmented; what is needed now is coordination.
“The most important thing is that we keep track of the results and make sure that innovations get transitioned to companies.”
He says that claims that robots take jobs away from people don’t take into account the fact that robots—and other technologies, for that matter—not only help keep companies competitive but also allow them to grow and hire more people.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which was involved in spearheading the new initiative, listed several reasons to make robotics a priority:
Robotics can address a broad range of national needs such as advanced manufacturing, logistics, services, transportation, homeland security, defense, medicine, healthcare, space exploration, environmental monitoring, and agriculture;
Robotics technology is reaching a “tipping point” and is poised for explosive growth because of improvements in core technologies such as microprocessors, sensors, and algorithms;
Robotics can play an important role in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education because it encourages hands-on learning and the integration of science, engineering, and creative thinking; and
Members of the research community such as the Computing Community Consortium and program managers in key sciences have developed a shared vision and an ambitious technical agenda for developing next-generation robotic systems that can safely work with humans and augment human capabilities.
But of course, the real reason behind the initiative: Obama loves robots.
“Investing in robotics is more than just money for research and development, it is a vehicle to transform American lives and revitalize the American economy. Indeed, we are at a critical juncture where we are seeing robotics transition from the laboratory to generate new businesses, create jobs and confront the important challenges facing our nation. The nation’s robotics community is collectively poised to advance the technology and at the same time accelerate the transition of these technologies from the lab into the market.”
— Helen Greiner, president and CEO, CyPhy Works; president, Robotics Technology Consortium; co-founder, iRobot
“A well coordinated National Robotics Initiative will provide the leadership and investment necessary to accelerate the advancement of next generation robotics technologies and knock down the regulatory and technological barriers necessary to lead to wide spread adoption and repatriation of US manufacturing jobs.”
— John Dulchinos, president and CEO, Adept Technology
“If we want to end the talk of a ‘jobless recovery,’ we should increase our national investments in robotics and create millions of high-paying jobs in the process. How? By developing improved robotics technology that can be applied to reviving our manufacturing industries, protecting the environment, reducing our dependence on foreign oil and helping provide quality care for our growing elderly population.”
— Jeff Burnstein, president, Robotics Industry Association
“The United States has pioneered research in Robotics and Automation; we are now poised to develop the next wave of robots that will dramatically enhance the abilities of human workers in factories, labs, hospitals, and homes.”
— Ken Goldberg, professor of engineering and information, U.C. Berkeley
“Robotics is a game-changer! President Obama’s National Robotics Initiative will lead to new innovative technologies that will invigorate America’s manufacturing economy by creating new opportunities and new jobs, improve our quality of life by revolutionizing health care and medicine, and make our nation safer with the development of robots for defense, security and emergency response.”
— Vijay Kumar, professor, University of Pennsylvania
“The use of robotics in medicine and health care has seen substantial growth in the last decade. Telerobotic systems are routinely used to perform surgery, resulting in shorter recovery times and more reliable outcomes for patients. Robotic rehabilitation systems are delivering physical and occupational therapy, enabling treatment that is continuously adaptable to a patient’s needs. In the United States, robots are stimulating the development of new treatments for a wide variety of diseases and disorders, which will improve both the standard and accessibility of care.”
— Allison Okamura, professor of mechanical engineering, Stanford University; Maja Mataric, professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics, University of Southern California
“RE2 Inc. is representative of small robotics engineering businesses across the United States that are contributing to the economic growth of their regions. These small businesses form the backbone of the new economy by leveraging federal and private investments to create new high-tech jobs and ensure that the United States remains a leader of global innovation.”
— Jorgen Pedersen, president and CEO, RE2
Once upon a time, a charming American robot called James met a striking German bot by the name of Rosie. They liked each other, so they moved in together. Now they spend their days taking long walks in the lab and doing other things that robots do.
James is a PR2 robot, built by U.S. robotics firm Willow Garage, and it traveled to Germany as part of the PR2 Beta Program, an effort to popularize personal robots. At the Technical University Munich (TUM), James was introduced to Rosie, a dual-arm robot with a curvy figure and four eyes.
Their courtship was at first a bit mechanical, but they soon found many things in common: Both run ROS (Robot Operating System), use Hokuyo laser scanners and Kinect 3D sensors, and have omnidirectional mobile bases.
On a recent spring morning, James and Rosie were seen together cooking the traditional Weisswurst Frühstück, a Bavarian sausage breakfast.
A typical Bavarian Sausage BreakfastIt was a demonstration prepared by researchers at CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems), a Munich-based high-tech cluster. This is how the researchers summarize the experiment:
TUM-Rosie is collecting the sausages, putting them into the pot with boiling water, waiting for them to be cooked and, finally, finding and getting them out of the pot into the serving bowl. [The PR2 robot] TUM-James is meanwhile slicing the french baguette using a regular electric bread slicer and in the end serving the sausages and the bread to the class of highly regarded roboticists. […]
TUM-James makes use of recent advances in the field of real-time RGB-D sensing using a Kinect sensor for the detection of the bread slicer and the baguette. In the serving task it uses PR2’s haptic capabilities in order to grasp and manipulate the plate.
TUM-Rosie is also using Kinect and perception algorithms from COP [cognitive perception] module in order to calibrate the skimmer and use it as a new tool center point of the arm. Furthermore it learns the 3D models for the pot and the bowls in order to be able to localize them at any arbitrary pose on the table. Lastly, it uses the torque sensors to resolve depth measurement inaccuracies through contact detection with the objects and blob segmentation in order to localize sausages inside the pot.
The couple has a promising life ahead of them, and we look forward to hearing about their future adventures and, hopefully, seeing some baby robots too.
PS: This is not the first romantic meal the robots have together. Last year, the pair prepared a somewhat more mainstream breakfast: pancakes. Guten Appetit!
If you missed the last Robotics Trends’ Virtual Conference Series – Robotics Summit back in March (see my report) here is your chance to participate again. The next one is on June 22. Click here for more info.
From: eSchool News
June 7, 2011
By Jenna Zwang, Assistant Editor
Engaging students at younger ages and making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education more appealing were some of the main topics up for discussion at a roundtable discussion hosted by LEGO Education and National Instruments on June 3.
“I think a lot of kids [who] are sitting in classrooms aren’t engaged, because we aren’t stimulating them,” said Joan Abdallah of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS). “If we really engage the kids using various kinds of technology, I think we could be very successful.”
One such technology cited by Abdallah is a recently-released robotics program from LEGO Education and National Instruments. The LEGO Education WeDo Robotics Construction Set is an easy-to-use set that introduces elementary-school students to robotics, while LEGO MINDSTORMS Education is aimed at middle and high schools. LEGO also has released LEGO MINDSTORMS Education + TETRIX for use in high schools and colleges.
In April, National Instruments introduced LabView for LEGO MINDSTORMS, a new education-focused version of the company’s professional LabVIEW graphical design software developed specifically for the use of LEGO Education robots. Students learn from the same software used by scientists and engineers while visually controlling and programming their robots.
“[Students] want to create systems themselves, they want to design the game, they don’t want to play someone else’s game,” said Hunter Smith, K-12 product marketing engineer at National Instruments. “With robotics, there’s no correct answer, there’s no final solution, so everyone can create their own solution—and as long as you solve the challenge, you win.”
Smith said science activities too often don’t engage students, because they are too structured.
“A lot of times, in physics, it feels like you’re doing the lab for the lab’s sake, that you’re doing it for the grade and not for the science. You do this in robotics, and [students] stop thinking about the grade and they start thinking about all the crazy robots they can build. It’s inherently open-ended, and it’s real,” he said.
Stephan Turnipseed, the president of LEGO Education in North America, said the robotics program can be used to address community issues and help solve needs.
“We see a lot of teachers using robotics to engage in storytelling, which really has been interesting as it was an unexpected outcome,” he said.
However, engaging students is far from the only issue facing STEM education. According to the panel, many STEM teachers are not well trained, especially at the elementary level.
“There’s a huge need in elementary education for much better-prepared, skilled teachers, because if you have that and you can bring [good] math and science teachers in, the whole system is going to benefit,” said David Mandel, director of research and policy analysis with the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Abdallah agreed that a change is necessary.
“Teachers are ill prepared or unprepared by the universities, so it’s not their fault that they can’t do it,” she said.
“If you ask your average elementary school teacher if they’d like to teach robotics, they run screaming into the night,” Turnipseed said. “So we had to change our language.” He pointed out that when Smith teaches a programming course, he uses terminology designed to pique students’ curiosity, as opposed to confusing them with technical terms too early.
“[Smith] takes a very complex engineering idea and he says, ‘What we’re going to do right now is find out how fast this wiggles,’ rather than a fast Fourier transform, which is what we’re really doing mathematically,” Turnipseed said.
But there also have been some positive changes in terms of publicizing STEM education careers, panelists said.
“I think there is a trend of making science more important in our country. When you start to see more CSI and MythBusters and fewer reality shows, I think even if there’s just bits of science or aspects of science, making that a part of our culture reinforces it with kids,” Smith said.
Mandel pointed out the need for science education to begin at an earlier age.
“When Chinese and American kids are two years old, they look the same in terms of quantitative literacy. When they’re five years old, before they start school, there’s a huge difference; Chinese kids are way ahead, and it’s because dealing with numbers and measurement is something that goes on between parents and kids in China but not here,” Mandel said. He said that in the United States, parents teach their children the alphabet and how to read but don’t place any emphasis on numbers or understanding mathematics.
“One thing that’s coming down the pike are national science standards, and that’s going to start a big conversation including what should be going on in science in elementary education,” Mandel said. “We’ve got a lot of inertia to overcome.”
