Cyton Gamma robot arm to work with humanity

Ready to hold hands with a robot arm? Lighter than a laptop, this articulated mechanical limb "is not just another robot for roboticists," says Robai.

A new robot arm extends its manipulator in a gesture of friendship. Will you shake it?

Philadelphia-based robotics firm Robai hopes so. The latest of its Cyton robot arms is the Cyton Gamma, and it's designed to work with us meatsacks.

The Gamma's seven joints are "kinematically redundant," Robai says in a release, meaning it can move various ways to position itself. This gives it more dexterity.

The increased workload on the control system is handled by Actin, software from Energid Technologies that was developed for robots at NASA. The system uses a simple 3D graphical interface.

The Cyton Gamma weighs 4.4 pounds and has a reach similar to the human arm. It connects to Linux, Windows, or OS X systems via USB. Aside from programming with the GUI, it can be "trained" by being physically moved in space.

It also has support for ROS, the common robot programming framework being developed by Willow Garage.

"Our obsession has been on ease of use. We want the Gamma to be the first accessible robot on the market," Robai COO Neil Tardella says in the release. "This is not just another robot for roboticists."

It's been tested in applications such as remote inspection, manufacturing, and healthcare, according to Robai. The firm's Web site lists the Cyton Gamma MX-2 for $9,799.

The company's other arms have been used to test U.S. Army battlefield robots and to check under cars for dangerous objects.

What would you do with a robot arm?

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Expressive face helps robot bridge 'uncanny valley'

A good-looking robot is seriously hard to find. Robots can be pretty, some even handsome, but as soon as they get too realistic they start to creep us out. A new system for helping robots to generate more realistic expressions might go some way to help.

Many years ago, robotcists realized that as you morph an abstract robot into a human you generate a peak of unease - the "uncanny valley principle" - that makes people feel uncomfortable when a robot looks realistic but not realistic enough. Some say it's because they remind us of a corpse. However, researchhas shown that if you manipulate the robotic images so that they are more attractive, you can bypass this feeling of unease.

To create a robot we are more likely to accept, life-like expressions are vital. That's why Nicole Lazzeri at the University of Pisa, Italy, and her colleagues have designed a "Hybrid Engine for Facial Expressions Synthesis" (HEFES) - a facial animation engine that gives realistic expressions to a humanoid robot called FACE.

FACE's appearance is modelled on one of the team's wives. "It's really realistic," says Lazzeri, who presented the work at BioRob in Rome last month. See for yourself in the video above.

To mimic the myriad expressions that facial muscles are capable of achieving, the team placed 32 motors around FACE's skull and upper torso that manipulate its polymer skin in the same way that real muscles do.

To create expressions they used a combination of motor movements based on the Facial Action Coding System(FACS) - a system created over 30 years ago which codes facial expressions in terms of anatomic muscle movements.

HEFES is used to control FACE's expressions. It is essentially a mathematical programme that creates an "emotional space" which a person can use to choose an expression for FACE that exists anywhere between one or more basic emotions, including anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The algorithm then works out which motors need to be moved to create that expression or transition between two or more.

The team evaluated the accuracy of their expressions by asking five autistic and 15 non-autistic children to identify a set of expressions performed first by FACE and then by a psychologist. Both groups were able to identify happiness, anger and sadness but less able identify fear, disgust and surprise.

So is it more attractive? I'm not convinced. But FACE's ability to smoothly transition between one emotion and another is pretty remarkable. And not too creepy.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

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Robotic surgery performed for normalising urinary bladder

A seven-year-old girl from Dar es Salaam has a robot to thank for a life reboot.

The Tanzanian girl, who was admitted to Apollo Children’s Hospital after her urethra was crushed in a road accident in her home town, had been subjected to a complex robotic surgery to restore the urinary bladder to normal function.

Ashura Ibrahim had come to Apollo almost a year ago after unsuccessful attempts by doctors in Tanzania to normalize the urinary bladder that left her with a tube hanging from her bladder to pass urine causing physical and mental trauma.

Pediatric urologists found that the child’s bladder was constantly draining to the outside and holding capacity had shrunk. In an open surgery procedure, a flap of the bladder muscle was fashioned into a tube and tunneled to a normal position to serve as the urethra. A few weeks ago, the girl was back for a review and doctors found that in the process of healing, her left ureter had displaced towards the bladder neck and urine was refluxing into the kidney making her prone to frequent urinary infections and renal damage.

After evaluating the options before them, a team led by V. Sripathi, consultant pediatric urologist at Apollo, scheduled the patient for a robotic surgery to stop the urine reflux on June 25. “We ruled out open surgery to cease urine reflux, as it would leave the girl again with a tube to pass urine while a laparoscopy would have been unusually complicated because the ureteral opening was very low,” Dr. Sripathi said.

With the help of the Da Vinci Si robotic system with features such as 3-D field-view and “snake-wrist” arms that can be maneuvered 360 degrees, doctors could create a new bed and suture the ureter into it without reopening the bladder.

Little Ashura is now ready to return home along with her parents. Khery Goloka, Medical Attache, Tanzanian High Commission, Delhi, facilitated the treatment. According to doctors, the procedure was perhaps the first robotic surgery of its kind in pediatrics and the first complex redo on the bladder base.

“Robotic surgery enabled us to achieve a perfect result in a very difficult situation with very minimal morbidity, with no pain and helped achieve discharge within a day,” he said. And, he believed that this more than made up for extra Rs.1 lakh in expenses when compared to conventional intervention tagged at around Rs.80,000.

According to Srinidhi Chidambaram, coordinator for international patient services, Africa accounted for a significant proportion of the 16,000 foreign patient visits last year. Patients from Africa, along with West Asia and the SAARC countries, account for nearly 80 per cent of foreign patient arrivals.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author; Sudharsun. P. R.

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Artificial brain with billion connections

Google has done the unthinkable — the creation of an ‘artificial brain’ from 16,000 computer processors, with more than a billion connections.

The team led by Google’s Jeff Dean then fed it random images culled from 10 million YouTube videos — and let it ‘learn’ by itself.

Surprisingly, the machine focused in on cats. “We never told it during the training ‘this is a cat’,” said Dean. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”

The revelation

“Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not,” says the team.

“We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies.”

“Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8 per cent accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from Image Net, a leap of 70 per cent relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art,” it said,Daily Mail reports.

The ‘brain’ was a creation of the company’s ‘blue sky ideas’ lab, Google X, reportedly located in Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters — known as ‘the Googolplex.’

Engineers are free to work on projects such as connected fridges that order groceries when they run low — or even tableware that can connect to social networks.

Other Google engineers have reportedly researched ideas as far-out as elevators to space.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

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A wearable robot helps disabled people walk

“It’s a nice feeling to be upright, to walk and to have people at eye level,” said a beaming Peter Kossmehl at the Potsdam Rehabilitation Centre in Germany. The 40-year-old from the German state of Brandenburg had just tried out a bionic exoskeleton — a wearable, battery-powered robot — that enables paraplegics to take a few steps again.

The rehab centre is one of the first facilities in Europe to test the robot, called Ekso and made by Ekso Bionics. The California-based company introduced Ekso in the fall of 2011. Now it is to be tested worldwide on paraplegics, stroke and multiple sclerosis patients and other people with lower-extremity paralysis or weakness.

“In Germany, only patients in Aachen have tested the robot Ekso so far — that was a few weeks ago,” said company spokesman Bastian Schink. After them, eight people in Potsdam strapped on and tried out the approximately 23-kilogram exoskeleton. With the help of sensors in its foot units, weight shifts are converted into steps.

“I’d like to give my patients the opportunity to stand erect again as soon as possible,” said Bettina Quentin, director of physiotherapy at the rehab center south of Berlin. But Quentin, like many experts, warns against excessive expectations.

“People who function well with their wheelchair will always be faster in them than with the exoskeleton,” said Jan Schwab, head of spinal cord injury research at the Charite University Hospital’s Department of Experimental Neurology in Berlin. “The psychological benefits of a patient standing upright shouldn’t be underestimated, though.” The reactions of the Potsdam patients appeared to confirm this. “I’m not walking by myself,” he remarked. “It’s only passive walking.” Kossmehl, too, thinks more development work is needed. “But it’s just the right aid for the rehab center,” he said.

In the view of Ruediger Rupp, director of the Department of Experimental Neurorehabilitation in the Paraplegiology Clinic at Heidelberg University Hospital, the robot is no substitute for a wheelchair, especially considering that it is not suitable for all patients.

There are about 60,000 paraplegics in Germany, “of whom fewer than 10 per cent are candidates (for the robot),” he said. “That’s a very select group.” Someone who can hardly move his or her torso, for example, would have great difficulties with the robot.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

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Robot beats humans at rock-paper-scissors every time

The robot wars have begun, and no matter how fast you choose your weapon - rock, paper, or scissors - the robot will beat you every time.
The three-fingered robotic hand developed by Ishikawa Oku's lab at the University of Tokyo has a dirty secret: it cheats. A high-speed video camera runs at over 1000 frames per second and watches your wrist and fingers as you begin to form the shape. The robot's visual recognition program needs only one millisecond to figure out which shape your hand will take, and choose the one that will beat you.
When the human player in the video above tries to change his shape at the last minute, it still can't fool the robot at the game, which is called janken in Japan. Its timing is so precise that it never shows its hand too early, and it wins 100 per cent of the time.
This kind of high speed vision may have a more practical use than arming robots so they'll always get to bat first at robot baseball. Robots can recognize speech in real time by the forms the human mouth takes, cooperate with humans performing precision tasks that take two, and maybe intervene in an accident before it happens. The janken game is an early example of what Oku's lab calls "meta-perception": the Sherlock Holmes-like ability of machines to pick up information humans would miss.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

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Baby robot learns first words from human teacher

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

AT FIRST it's just noise: a stream of incoherent sounds, burbling away. But, after a few minutes, a fully formed word suddenly emerges: red. Then another: box. In this way, a babbling robot has learned to speak its first real words, just by chatting with a human.

Seeing this developmental leap in a machine may lead to robots that speak in a more natural, human-like way, and help uncover how children first start to make sense of language. Between the ages of 6 and 14 months children move from babbling strings of syllables to uttering actual words. It is a necessary step en route to acquiring full language. Once a few "anchor" words have been established, they provide clues as to where words may start and finish and so it becomes easier for a child to learn to speak.

Inspired by this process, a team led by computer scientist Caroline Lyon at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, programmed their humanoid robot iCub – called DeeChee – with almost all the syllables that exist in English – around 40,000 in total. This allowed it to babble rather like a baby, by arbitrarily stringing syllables together.

The researchers also enlisted 34 people to act as teachers, who were told to treat DeeChee as if it were a child. DeeChee took part in an 8-minute dialogue with each teacher but, between each session, its memory was saved, and then wiped and reset, so that with each teacher, the experiment started anew. At the outset of the dialogue, each of the syllables in DeeChee's lexicon had an identical score.

Lexicon score

All that started to change once the lesson began. Programmed to take turns listening and then speaking, DeeChee turned the teacher's speech into syllables, totting up the number of instances of each one. It then used this information to update the scores in its own lexicon, giving extra points to syllables the teacher had used.

When it next spoke, it would be more likely to repeat the syllables the teacher had uttered because these now had higher scores.

Lyon says this is reminiscent of human infants. "When they hear frequent sounds, they become sensitive to them," says Lyon. "They prefer what's familiar."

This learning by imitation was then reinforced, as teachers made encouraging comments when DeeChee spoke a recognisable word. DeeChee was programmed to detect these comments and give extra points to the syllables that preceded the teacher's approval. Inevitably some nonsense syllables would get extra points too. But as this process was repeated, only those syllables that made up words would keep showing up in strings that gained approval.

Though the robot was still uttering nonsense streams of syllables, towards the end of the 8 minutes, real words kept popping up more often than if DeeChee were still selecting syllables at random.

That words can emerge from babble using a statistical learning process not specific to language demonstrates that this stage of language acquisition does not require hard-wired grammar faculties, says Lyon.

Paul Vogt, a cognitive scientist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands is impressed: "It's a very interesting first step towards having robots that can help us study language acquisition."

Right now, DeeChee's speech is a far cry from full-blown language, but starting with babbling could be the best way to create robots that speak naturally. "If you want the robot to work with natural speech, then you might need to teach it from the very beginning," says Lyon

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

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Adaptive theremin keeps jamming robots in tune

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Getting robots and humans to jam together is a useful exercise in artificial intelligence, because the robot has to generate notes that sound nice alongside the tune the human is playing - all in real time. But if the robot just happens to be playing the theremin, which doeshappen occasionally, humans can cause problems by invading the instrument's space - it makes the robot play out of tune.

To the rescue (phew!) comes Takeshi Mizumoto at Kyoto University in Japan. He showed a conference on applied intelligent systems in Dalian, China, this week a theremin able to cope with such incursions - as you can see in the video above. "The robot plays the correct pitch even if a guitarist comes closer to the theremin in a jam session," he says. His trick is an adaptive pitch-control algorithm that tracks the tune the robot plays and attempts to stop the pitch diverging when the human interrupts it.

Luckily, it's not just useful for keeping theremin-playing robots in tune. He says the algorithm, which currently reduces unmelodious errors by 90 per cent, will have practical uses when refined further - in allowing robots to track human faces in video footage.

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Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R. Source: NewScientist

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