What is Artificial Intelligence?

Would you like Nexi to teach you how human strangers trust?

Would you trust a stranger? Maybe not, or maybe yes, at some point. But would you let a humanoid teach you how humans develop their trust to strangers?

Probably, out of curiosity, you would say "Yes!" But, this is in fact, true and an on-going study among experts from the fields of psychology, robotics and economics.

This interdisciplinary study is a collaboration of the MIT Media Lab's Personal Robots Group, Robert Frank, an economist, and David Pizarro, a psychologist, both from Cornell. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers have taken advantage of a humanoid, named Nexi, a talking and moving robot.

Nexi, performs an actual conversation with participants using human-like hand and body gestures, which have been pre-programmed to mimic humans way of expressing or developing trustworthiness to strangers.

The study is conducted to determine, how humans interact with strangers, in a gesture or gestures that they might gain their trust.

Click here to read more about Nexi, Robot Teaching How How to Trust

Who would not like a treat? Something free that's worth a thousand bucks when actually sold. Yes, and it's Microsoft Robotics giving away its RDS software to anyone... no restrictions... for FREE!

What's an RDS by the way? It's Microsoft Robotics platform for developing your own robot using its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS). The new R3 version is a Windows®-based platform for academic, enthusiasts, and industrial developers to effortlessly produce robotics applications over a huge range of hardware available. All previous versions though have been integrated into this new version, RDS 2008 R3.

Why has Microsoft done such a good act? It is actually part of Microsoft's new philosophies, that by providing such tools for free would help to ignite a reform in consumer robotics, and start a new era in robotics technology.

The New RDS R3 is a set of development tools containing a visual programming interface and a 3D simulator which, when synchronized to work together with lots of tutorials on the side, will make one to start creating his first robot as easily as possible.

Microsoft RDS includes a programming model that makes it quick to create asynchronous, state-driven applications. Microsoft RDS provides a standard, conventional programming framework that can be applied to support a huge range of robots, enabling code and skill transfer.

You can download Microsoft R3 2008 here.

Click here to read more about Microsoft Robotics, New Microsoft RDS 2008 R3.

EPOC communicates via Skype to Rovio

A mind controlled spy robot is rather expensive. If you don't have enough funds to support your enthusiasm, why not build one for yourself?

Yes, you can do it yourself! Let us take for example one engineer who wanted to build one for himself with just a few of the essential elements for the development; hardware, some software and brains to make it work.

Robert Oschler is just one of the robot fans who wanted to create his own version of ROVIO, a mind controlled Robodance. However this time he wanted to control it with his mind using the EPOC EEG Headset.

Remember the EPOC EEG headset which we also featured in this blog sometime in January of this year? Well, if you were able to get one, you will be able to use it to control your own spy robot.

How does it works?

1) He created a connection between the EPOC headset and the Robodance with his own set Emotiv Systems software developer’s kit (SDK).

2) The EPOC headset communicates with the Roboclient, a software program, which translates signals and sends them via Skype to another client computer.

3) The other computer interprets the date from Skype, and sends it to the Robodance software

4) Then, Robodance take these signals as robot commands, which are then communicated via WiFi to the Rovio

Just watch the video below and you'll see how cool it is.

Click here to read more about ROVIO, Mind Controlled Spy Robot

Sami Haddadin, the study's lead author, who was clearly confident in the collision-detection system he devised.

Attack of the robots.... and with knives too! Aahhh (run!!!)

It's like robots in the movies are coming to reality. It may sound stupid, but when we think of robots carrying some sharp tools, (for what?), it will drive us crazy, thinking they might run out of control and become like killing machines.

Oh, no but not these robots here who were the subjects of the Collision Detection Study from the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, part of DLR, the German aerospace agency, in Wessling, Germany.

The researchers, headed by Sami Haddadin demonstrated how "his" robot was literally safe even if it would accidentally bump into human "flesh" during an activity, like in the kitchen, in a hospital or even in a car industry or whatsoever.

The German researchers set out to do a set of experiments, namely, puncturing, stabbing and cutting (see video) to determine the accuracy of the collision detection of the robots.

The robot was armed with various sharp tools (scalpel, kitchen knife, scissors, steak knife, and screwdriver) and integrated with a collision detection program to perform these different striking activities. They've used a piece of silicone block, a pig's leg, and at a final demo, a human bare arm as test surfaces.

Click here to read more about Collision Detection Robot, Robots with Knives

The Technical University of Munich and the Institute of Technology Autonomous Systems (TAS) are developing the successor of their robot JOHNNIE. It is called LOLA and it is capable of planning its own walking trajectory through a room in real-time using image data.

LOLA is equipped with gyro sensors in its upper body and 6-axis force sensors in its feet to help maintain balance. It stands 180cm (5?10?) tall, weighs 60kg (132 lbs), and has a total of 25 degrees of freedom (2 legs x7, 2 arms x3, waist x2, head x3). To reduce the load and increase its step length and walking speed, they put an extra toe joint on LOLA. However, LOLA is connected via cables to three computers which handle this task due to the processing power required to perform image recognition.

Click here to read more about LOLA.