Posts tagged Robots
‘The rise of the robot’ on BBC Business Daily
11 years ago
‘The rise of the robot’ explored in BBC Business News / Business Daily on 31 Dec 2012.
“Justin Rowlatt meets Ghislaine Boddington, creative director of body>data>space, a company which specialises in how new technology can improve the way we communicate.”
Download here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/bizdaily/all
Outrace – Robots in Trafalgar Square
14 years ago
Credit: Outrace
This year as part of London Design Festival the public were invited to take control of eight industrial robots on loan from Audi’s production line. OUTRACE is an installation by Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram, that consists of 6 independent systems coordinated by one KWTC CONTROLLER. Messages were sent in by the public, via a website, and then processed by the system every 60 seconds.
By way of a powerful LED light source, positioned at the tool head of each robot, people’s messages were traced into the public space of Trafalgar Square. Long-exposure cameras captured the interactive light paintings and relayed them to the project website and social media platforms to be shared.
Robots and Avatars sent in a message to OUTRACE which was shown at the rather unsociable time of 7.08am! Here is the video of the drawing – see if you can work out what we sent…
Robot Resemblance
Little Island of Japan is a company that comes up with clone robots, and to date their efforts with robotic dolls have managed to bear a close resemblance to celebrities as well as politicians, being highlighted in TV shows as well as worldwide news.
For those who want a robotic avatar of yourself, it will take around 3 months from your order for the robot to be churned out and delivered right to your doorstep. These robots come with sensors built-in to detect when people are nearby, and are full well capable of waving its hands and saying a simple “Hello”. Each robot stands at 70cm in height and will set you back by a cool $2,200 after conversion.
Mobile Phone Robot
Canadian researchers trying to integrate robots into our lives have come up with a pair of dancing, crying mobile phone ‘bots. The robots, called Callo and Cally, are mobile phones with limbs.
Cally stands about 18cm high and walks, dances and mimics human behavior. Callo stands about 23cm tall, and his face, which is a cell phone display screen, shows human facial expressions when he receives text-messaged emotions. When he receives a smile emoticon, Callo stands on one leg, waves his arms and smiles. If he receives a frown, his shoulders slump and he will cry. If he gets an urgent message, or a really sad one, he’ll wave his arms frantically.
PhD student Ji-Dong Yim and Prof Chris D. Shaw from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Canada have collaborated to create a robot using the combination of Nokia N82 along with components from a Bioloid kit.
Along with an the ability to move in preprogrammed patterns when receiving phone calls from different numbers, robot is also capable to detect human faces using OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision). Robot uses wireless networking, text messaging and other interactive technologies to communicate human emotions. It’s a “simple avatar system” according to Yim.
The robot’s face, which is actually a phone screen, registers text-messaged emotions as human-like facial express.
“When you move your robot, my robot will move the same, and vice versa, so that we can share emotional feelings using ‘physically smart’ robot phones,” he says in an SFU release.
More videos here.
Seven species of robot – Dennis Hong
At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning, all-terrain robots — like the humanoid, soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR — all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab’s incredible technical success.
Dennis Hong is the founder and director of RoMeLa — a Virginia Tech robotics lab that has pioneered several breakthroughs in robot design and engineering.
