I could totally use one of these in the kitchen. Although it appears that the robot’s ability to properly cut stuff in equal sizes still requires some improvements, I’m pretty convinced that he still has better developed culinary skills than me. Related article here.
October 29th is a very special day. It’s ASIMO’s birthday! Yes, ASIMO turned 10 years old a few days ago! Below is an awesome video by Honda, showing a timeline of the development of ASIMO.
It’s hard to believe that ASIMO has been around for 10 years already! In the first 7-8 years, the improvements and new capabilities that were added to ASIMO were rather frequent and pretty impressive. However I’m afraid that I haven’t read anything on the ASIMO website in the past couple of years to really WOW me! And now with some serious competitors [like NASA’s R2], I think ASIMO has some catching up to do! So happy birthday ASIMO, and whatever you’re doing, hurry it up! =P
You can read about ASIMO’s birthday here, and here‘s a story released by Honda about development of ASIMO.
Pretty cool article I found on MS research today. Check out the awesome AI receptionist avatar!
“Eric Horvitz, a distinguished scientist at Microsoft Research, has an equally distinguished receptionist. After eight years of working with him, she’s developed a feel for his habits and routines. She can predict how long his meetings are likely to last, knows when he can’t be interrupted and senses when he’ll be running late. Not bad for an avatar.”
“Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Virginia Tech’s Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory, or RoMeLa, has created robots with the most unusual shapes and sizes — from strange multi-legged robots to amoeba-like robots with no legs at all. Now he’s unveiling a new robot with a more conventional shape: a full-sized humanoid robot called CHARLI, or Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence. The robot is 5-foot tall (1.52 meter), untethered and autonomous, capable of walking and gesturing. But its biggest innovation is that it does not use rotational joints.”
Here’s another serious competitor for ASIMO. I just came across this article on IEEE Spectrum and was pretty amazed by how natural some of this robot’s moves are. And it actually looks pretty neat too! The wrist + finger movements / control impressed me the most.
I just came across a couple of very interesting videos on this article on BotJunkies. Both videos display pretty amazing navigation capabilities in robots, and the ability to recognize and avoid the obstacles, even moving ones. Most of the processing equipment for the HRP-2 robot are off board though, which is why I find ASIMO still a lot cooler. 😉
“We have put together a video of our Milestone 2 run, which we completed this past Monday, June 1, 2009. This particular run had our PR2 alpha robot navigate through eight doors, and plug its power cord into nine outlets. In this video, you can see the various challenges our robot faced, such as a crowded office environment and the abrupt appearance of a human obstacle. We nearly sabotaged the run early on. Folks around the office were eager to track the progress of the robot, so many people ran their own monitoring programs on the PR2. This caused an increase in CPU load, starving the navigation software. Nonetheless, the robot was able to continue with the run, albeit more slowly and cautiously.”
“We are currently developing algorithms that will narrow the learning gap between humans and machines, and enable flight systems to ‘learn’ the way humans do: through practice.
Rather than being programmed with detailed instructions, these flight systems will learn from experience. Like baby birds leaving the nest, they will be clumsy at first. Over time, however, they will become capable of sophisticated, coordinated maneuvers……”
Hey, I'm Aasemoon, and this is my blog which has been around since 1998. Childhood toy project that ended up growing up with me.
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aasemoon.blue
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October 29th is a very special day. It’s ASIMO’s birthday! Yes, ASIMO turned 10 years old a few days ago! Below is an awesome video by Honda, showing a timeline of the development of ASIMO. 
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