In the following video, the protagonist is the search and rescue robot of the EU project NIFTi (www.nifti.eu).
As you can see, the footage shown in the video demonstrates the capacity of the robot in performing in adverse environments. Human-robot interaction has also been brought up to a very high level, allowing the robot to interact in a human-friendly way :).
Spirit, one of the two NASA MERs sent in early 2004, was meant to be operational for a minimum period of three months. Yet, it continued to operate for 5 years until one of its wheels got broken.
Its contribution to the robotics community... eternal.
The footage below, shows pictures taken during the 5 year lifetime of Spirit.
World Wide Web for Robots or equivalently "RoboEarth".
At its core, RoboEarth is a World Wide Web for robots: a giant network and database repository where robots can share information and learn from each other about their behavior and their environment. Bringing a new meaning to the phrase “experience is the best teacher”, the goal of RoboEarth is to allow robotic systems to benefit from the experience of other robots, paving the way for rapid advances in machine cognition and behaviour, and ultimately, for more subtle and sophisticated human-machine interaction.
RoboEarth first open source release can be found at:
An impressive application of cognitive science and robotics from the AutoNOMOS Labs of the Artificial Intelligence Group of the Freie Universität Berlin.
BrainDriver
MadeInGermany controlled via the Emotiv EPOC Brain Machine Interface:
After testing iPhone, iPad and an eye-tracking device as possible user interfaces to maneuver our research car named “MadeInGermany”, we now also use Brain Power. The “BrainDriver” application is of course a demonstration and not roadworthy yet but on the long run human-machine interfaces like this could bare huge potential in combination with autonomous driving. For example when it comes to decide which way you want to take on a crossroad while the autonomous cab drives you home.
"In order to differentiate 4 individual thigh muscles in the healthy versus COPD groups, we first applied a state-of-the-art 3D shape descriptor; the WT-based shape descriptor proposed by Papadakis et al. [14] resulting in cylindrical projections. A comparison between the classification accuracies obtained by the aforementioned descriptors and the global shape descriptors by Ward et al. [20] and HajGhanbari et al. [10] shows that, averaged over all the 4 muscles, the WT-based shape descriptors outperformed the global shape descriptors."
"Although the presented descriptors were applied to differentiate thigh muscles, they might have a widespread application for other conditions and chronic diseases that result in muscle atrophy such as chronic heart diseases, AIDS, cancer, and osteoarthritis."
Although the development of PANORAMA aimed toward effective retrieval of generic 3D objects, it makes me proud that it could further serve the domain of medical image analysis.
I feel that this is the essence of good research, that is, to promote and develop tools and methods that assist humans and science in general in a cross-disciplinary fashion.
I assembled a draft list of robots manufacturers, quite popular within the robotics community as a reference for what is currently the market demand together with the respective products.
A demonstration of the potential of the applications of machine vision and robotics. The talk is given by Sebastian Thrun, pioneer in the field of robotics research.
For the practitioners of Vision and Robotics, relevant sources of information and software platforms are the sine qua non for effectiveness (doing the right thing) and efficiency (doing things right) in research and development.
A full list of resources would be of course boundless, but the prominent (in terms of popularity and spread) resources would probably suffice the average interest:
The use of all the above resources are FREE for everyone and tutorials are all around the internet for amateurs and professionals. Get a grip on and enjoy!
This is my initiating post of my blog "Vision & Robotics".
I created this blog as a means to communicate news, advances in the science of machine vision and robotics as well as promote research in these fields.
The interest as well as imagination of people for automatic, self-intelligent machines traces back thousands of years ago. To the best of my knowledge, "Talos" (or equivalently "Τάλως" in greek) was probably the first humanoid robot constructed by God "Ifaistos" to guard the island of Crete according to the hellenic mythology.
The extent to which the records about Talos are true are not so important. What is important is that man's creations first take shape in imagination and in this aspect, we can accept that this first step was made a long ago and that today we have a plethora of tools in our disposal to make the trip from imagination into reality.
