Random Accesses

This week marks another incremental step forward in the field of robotics, specifically around gestural control. Brown University reports that their researchers have demonstrated how a robot can follow nonverbal commands from a person in a variety of environments — indoors as well as outside — all without adjusting for lighting. The modified iRobot PackBot can physically follow a person at a select distance without the person needing to wear special clothing, be in a special environment, or look backward at the robot, according to Chad Jenkins, assistant professor of computer science at Brown University and the team’s leader.

Jenkins and his team presented the achievement and a paper at the 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2009) in San Diego recently.

The team developed this capability with two key advances. The first involved visual recognition, which when applied to robots means helping them to orient themselves with respect to the objects in a room. The second advance was to provide the robot with a way to maintain a set distance from a human commander, and that involved a special depth-imaging camera called a CSEM Swiss Ranger.

Source: http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1338

Who doesn’t long for household help at times? Service robots will soon be able to relieve us of heavy, dirty, monotonous or irksome tasks. Research scientists have now presented a new generation of household robots, the “Care-O-bot® 3”.

The one-armed robot glides slowly to the kitchen table. With its three fingers, it carefully picks up the bottle of apple juice and puts it next to the glasses on the tray in front of it. Then it glides back into the lounge and serves the drinks to the guests. This is how artificial assistants might work in future.

Only 1.45 meters high, Care-O-bot® 3 is the prototype of a new generation of service robots designed to help humans in the household. The quick-to-learn assistant was developed by research scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA in Stuttgart.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/07/080710113026.htm