tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65321744313489147082024-03-19T03:57:02.150+01:00Vision & RoboticsPanagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.comBlogger84125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-85818668429163004982019-06-08T13:40:00.000+02:002019-06-08T13:40:57.342+02:00Ancient Robots<div style="text-align: justify;">
I came by accident across this book and its title, unavoidably, caught my attention. Written by Eirini Mpourdakou, the book goes back into ancient times providing an overview of ancient automation technology. </div>
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Via archaeological artifacts as well as scriptures detailing the design of such technology, the reader discovers that starting more than 2000 years ago with Greek civilization and pursued by Byzantin and Arab later on, the foundations of modern automation technology were being set. Predominantly based on simple hydraulic rules, inventions of incredible ingenuity could be designed from automatic maids and fountains for courtyards of nobles and kings to moving and speaking statues for religious use inside temples. </div>
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Being more than just an overview of such inventions, the book seeks to highlight the long standing desire of the human to create technology and tools capable of performing the toil inducing, repeatable tasks. Through ancient art and mythology, we witness this desire and human vision for mastering nature's laws and exploiting them at our service. Which is the very definition of "robot" today, namely, the worker who performs labor on demand.</div>
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A very nice read, rich with pictures and well documented.</div>
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<a href="https://cdn.ianos.gr/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/650x650/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/d/7/d7688699-b910-4170-962f-7131d810b4c3_2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="650" data-original-width="451" height="320" src="https://cdn.ianos.gr/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/650x650/17f82f742ffe127f42dca9de82fb58b1/d/7/d7688699-b910-4170-962f-7131d810b4c3_2.jpg" width="222" /></a></div>
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ISBN: 960-7931-71-8</div>
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Year: 2001</div>
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Language: Greek</div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-79042869870839338942017-08-14T15:54:00.000+02:002017-08-14T16:01:04.290+02:00Motobot project - Automated motorcycle driving<div style="text-align: center;">
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-61300701951604476432017-04-29T16:41:00.000+02:002017-04-29T16:41:05.211+02:00Robot cow milker<div style="text-align: center;">
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-51336743327107072262017-02-18T13:22:00.004+01:002017-02-18T13:22:35.729+01:00Eagles trained to intercept drones in the french military<div style="text-align: justify;">
These sorts of projects make really cool headlines (at least, until the arrival of drones with defensive capabilities).</div>
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On an earlier <a href="http://vision-robotics.blogspot.fr/2016/02/training-eagles-to-intercept-drones.html">post</a>, we had seen already the Dutch working on the same idea. Check out this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l49dpSmwqOw">video</a> for more advanced apparatuses.</div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-70676164091333803812017-01-30T18:10:00.002+01:002017-01-30T18:11:56.098+01:00My colleague is a robot<div style="text-align: justify;">
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This is a very interesting book written recently by <b>Valéry Bonneau</b>. It showcases a number of representative robots from various domaines of applications (from agriculture, to services, industry, entertainment, etc) and pinpoints, in a tone that combines humour, pessimism and severity at the same time, how robots are steadily starting to replace humans, and in turn, render obsolete a variety of professions / jobs. </div>
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It is very up to date with respect to the state-of-the-art in robotics technology and could be very easily read by audiences of all ages and backgrounds. As a professional in the domain, as well as an individual, i highly recommend it to potential readers (currently only francophones as i guess it has not yet been translated).</div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-81617853124494626592016-11-27T16:07:00.002+01:002017-01-30T18:13:50.770+01:00Personal gardening robot<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>FARM-BOT (Open-source)</b></div>
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<b></b><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="270" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8r0CiLBM1o8" width="500"></iframe></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-13015878771060728132016-09-15T21:02:00.000+02:002016-09-15T21:03:54.014+02:00Wi Vi: Using wifi signals to sense human presence and activity<b>Abstract</b>:<br />
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Wi-Fi signals are typically information carriers between a transmitter
and a receiver. In this paper, we show that Wi-Fi can also
extend our senses, enabling us to see moving objects through walls
and behind closed doors. In particular, we can use such signals to
identify the number of people in a closed room and their relative
locations. We can also identify simple gestures made behind a wall,
and combine a sequence of gestures to communicate messages to
a wireless receiver without carrying any transmitting device. The
paper introduces two main innovations. First, it shows how one can
use MIMO interference nulling to eliminate reflections off static
objects and focus the receiver on a moving target. Second, it shows
how one can track a human by treating the motion of a human body
as an antenna array and tracking the resulting RF beam. We demonstrate
the validity of our design by building.<br />
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Link to paper:</div>
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<a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf">http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf</a></div>
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Link to project web-page:</div>
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<a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/">http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/</a></div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-4695615603519294782016-08-05T09:35:00.000+02:002016-08-05T09:35:52.902+02:00From 3D printing to robot tattooing<div style="text-align: center;">
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Tattoo robot "made in France", yes Sir. Visual servoing people rejoice!</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="240" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/175491863" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="430"></iframe></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-16462155138743454512016-06-24T21:29:00.002+02:002016-07-28T18:34:59.471+02:00Spot Mini<div style="text-align: center;">
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-24068123396701064742016-03-02T15:02:00.001+01:002017-01-30T18:13:22.422+01:00Introducing robots in the train stations of France<div style="text-align: center;">
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This is a cleaning robot that will shortly be deployed in the Gare de Lyon. I wander how this is considered from the socialist party of François Hollande. Of course, cleaning jobs will be shortened but engineering posts will be opened, but in the end, what is the real (economic and societal) cost for the introduction of such robotic technology?</div>
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On the other hand, a robot "valet" that carries your suitcases and follows you, is indeed within the french culture and in my opinion should have no problem to be accepted as technology...</div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-79666899491955337152016-02-20T16:31:00.001+01:002017-01-30T18:12:48.972+01:00Deep Art<div style="text-align: center;">
------ <a href="http://www.deepart.io/"><b>http://www.deepart.io/</b></a> ------ </div>
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<b>Abstract</b>: In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.<br />
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<a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.06576">Original article</a></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-42126884482695050792016-02-04T10:48:00.001+01:002017-01-30T18:14:34.329+01:00Training eagles to intercept drones?<div style="text-align: justify;">
A "catchy" idea for the moment, but unrealistic in terms of induced cost. Makes me wonder of the reaction of the eagle in the scenario where the drone is equipped with a very high-frequency sound emitter to deafen the eagle. </div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-13190206789770713452016-01-09T12:40:00.000+01:002017-01-30T18:15:11.000+01:00Object recognition App for the visually Impaired - Aipoly<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://aipoly.com/">http://aipoly.com/</a></div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="240" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XMdct-5bERQ" width="426"></iframe></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-16617136146246752842016-01-02T13:14:00.001+01:002017-01-30T18:16:19.853+01:00Help EMILY robot help drowning refugees<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Friends of <b>CRASAR</b> (Center for Robotic-Assisted Search & Rescue)</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "lato" , sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 25px;">We can't wait any longer- people are drowning and the technology exists to help. We have permission from the Hellenic Coast Guard and partial funding but are short $5,000. We will send 2 small robot marine vehicles (EMILY, which are used by the Los Angeles County Fire Department to rescue drowning victims) and a team of 4 to rescue drowning refugees fleeing from Turkey to Greece. Check fundraiser site below</span></div>
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<a href="https://www.gofundme.com/Friends-of-CRASAR">https://www.gofundme.com/Friends-of-CRASAR</a></div>
<br />Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-64409691816611355952015-11-24T19:02:00.000+01:002017-01-30T18:16:48.784+01:00Ancient humanoids: the automatic maid of Philon of ByzantiumTranslated from <a href="http://kotsanas.com/exh.php?exhibit=0401001">Ancient Hellenic Technology</a>:<br />
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<b>The automatic maid of Philon</b>:<br />
(the first operational robot in history)<br />
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This is about a humanoid robot in the form of a maid (in natural size), holding on the right hand a wine jar. When a visitor placed a cup on the palm of her left hand, she would initially pour wine and subsequently mix it with water following the visitor' s desire.</div>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"><b>Description of operation</b>: There are two containers in the interior of the maid, filled with water and wine, respectively. Two tubes that start at the bottom of the containers go through the right hand and conclude at the tip of jar. Two air tubes are exposed to the top of the two containers and go through their interior, passing through the stomach. Her left hand is connected through a joint to her shoulder while a spring placed at its center lifts the arm upwards. Another two tubes commence from the same point and go down (going through and blocking the perforated corners of the air tubes). </span><span style="text-align: justify;">The tubes of the joint dispose two holes/openings at their endings, the hole that connects with the wine container preceding that which connects with the water container. When the cup is placed at the palm of the maid, her left hand goes down and the tubes of the joint go upwards. The opening of one of the tubes is aligned with the air tube of the wine container, air enters the container and wine flows from the tube of the wine jar to the cup. When the cup becomes half full with wine, the hand (due to its weight) goes further down, the opening of the air tube for the wine is blocked and the flow is interrupted. At the same time, the opening of the second tube is aligned with the air tube for the water container and water starts to flow in the cup for diluting the wine. When the cup is entirely full, the hand continues to go further down (due to its weight), the opening of the air tube to the water container is blocked and water flow is interrupted. Moreover, if the cup is removed from the hand at any time, the left hand goes upwards, the tubes of the joint go down, thus blocking the air tubes and creating a void in the containers and the flow of liquids is halted. Thus, the maid fills our cup with pure wine or wine diluted with water at the desired ratio, depending on the time when we remove the cup from her hand.</span></div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-23835385846663855722015-11-02T10:25:00.000+01:002017-01-30T18:15:49.065+01:00Next INNOROBO in Paris!From 24 until 26 of May, INNOROBO exhibition will take place in Paris, France. I will try to keep this post updated with new information related to the event.<br />
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Full information below:<br />
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<a href="http://innorobo.com/en/home/">http://innorobo.com/en/home/</a><br />
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<br />Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-89775219061618343402015-05-28T20:02:00.002+02:002015-06-02T15:46:57.612+02:00Robots that can adapt like animals<br />
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<b>Antoine Cully, Jeff Clune, Danesh Tarapore, Jean-Baptiste Mouret</b>, Robots that can adapt like animals, <b>Nature</b>, 2015.</div>
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<b>Abstract</b>: Robots have transformed many industries, most notably manufacturing, and have the power to deliver tremendous benefits to society, such as in search and rescue, disaster response, health care and transportation. They are also invaluable tools for scientific exploration in environments inaccessible to humans, from distant planets to deep oceans. A major obstacle to their widespread adoption in more complex environments outside factories is their fragility. Whereas animals can quickly adapt to injuries, current robots cannot ‘think outside the box’ to find a compensatory behaviour when they are damaged: they are limited to their pre-specified self-sensing abilities, can diagnose only anticipated failure modes and require a pre-programmed contingency plan for every type of potential damage, an impracticality for complex robots. A promising approach to reducing robot fragility involves having robots learn appropriate behaviours in response to damage, 11, but current techniques are slow even with small, constrained search spaces. Here we introduce an intelligent trial-and-error algorithm that allows robots to adapt to damage in less than two minutes in large search spaces without requiring self-diagnosis or pre-specified contingency plans. Before the robot is deployed, it uses a novel technique to create a detailed map of the space of high-performing behaviours. This map represents the robot’s prior knowledge about what behaviours it can perform and their value. When the robot is damaged, it uses this prior knowledge to guide a trial-and-error learning algorithm that conducts intelligent experiments to rapidly discover a behaviour that compensates for the damage. Experiments reveal successful adaptations for a legged robot injured in five different ways, including damaged, broken, and missing legs, and for a robotic arm with joints broken in 14 different ways. This new algorithm will enable more robust, effective, autonomous robots, and may shed light on the principles that animals use to adapt to injury.</div>
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<b>Article reference</b>:</div>
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<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14422">http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14422</a></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-64667233061525285282015-05-15T10:49:00.003+02:002015-05-15T10:49:57.978+02:00Baidu’s Artificial-Intelligence Supercomputer (Minwa) Beats Google at Image Recognition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT5yLFrz6wZnpP_q3U_WoPajo4nkWeFm8P5EMca2muQY2TGr-Gn0hM4mJ1OR7ZXGj9g_0_Qffh23NuRe0OTxSLS38ohdoKp5otVXwNNtjyVMcnf62QqTisNVIQMW5ApsGmhGBnpwotHfg/s1600/Screenshot+from+2015-05-15+10:48:14.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="367" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjT5yLFrz6wZnpP_q3U_WoPajo4nkWeFm8P5EMca2muQY2TGr-Gn0hM4mJ1OR7ZXGj9g_0_Qffh23NuRe0OTxSLS38ohdoKp5otVXwNNtjyVMcnf62QqTisNVIQMW5ApsGmhGBnpwotHfg/s400/Screenshot+from+2015-05-15+10:48:14.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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The race for ever-increasing discriminative power in image classification has been heating up over the last period.</div>
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2 days ago the chinese <b>Baidu</b> search company announced that they beat the previous record in image recognition set by <b>Microsoft Research</b>, by a marginal 0.36% less error rate. Microsoft was the first to <a href="http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft-research-surpasses-human-level-performance-on-imagenet-classification-dataset/">surpass human recognition performance</a> almost 3 months ago in February 2015, with <b>Google</b> currently holding the 2nd best recognition performance.</div>
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All this is made possible through the use of <b>deep convolutional networks</b> and <b>deep learning</b> schemes, namely, the construction of neuromorphic recognition schemes where raw information passes through multiple intermediate layers before giving the desired class recognition output. This is made possible by using immense computational power (super-computers) which is directed into training a system onto huge amounts of ground-truth data.</div>
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These news come as a follow-up to the previous post on <a href="http://vision-robotics.blogspot.fr/2015/04/audiovisual-emotion-emulation-meet.html">human emotion emulation and recognition</a> where scientists reported that the corresponding system could reach and marginally exceed the human recognition performance of emotions!</div>
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For those interested, you may have a look at the news talking about the technological breakthrough here:<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/news/537436/baidus-artificial-intelligence-supercomputer-beats-google-at-image-recognition/">Baidu’s Artificial-Intelligence Supercomputer Beats Google at Image Recognition</a></div>
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and at the arxiv repository for corresponding scientific documentation on the respective systems:</div>
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- <b>Baidu</b>: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.02876">Deep Image: Scaling Up Image Recognition</a></div>
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- <b>Microsoft</b>: <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.01852">Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification</a></div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-63030783985439935322015-04-19T21:35:00.001+02:002015-04-19T21:35:38.012+02:00Audiovisual emotion emulation; meet virtual "Zoe" avatar<div style="text-align: center;">
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A marvelous technological achievement brought when social sciences and engineering sciences meet altogether, by talented people. Can you imagine this expression capacity to be demonstrated by an actual robot? The amount of empathy or antipathy would you develop as a response? What would happen if these automatic emotive expressions could be intelligently emulated in order to induce a certain emotional response to the recipient? The following article is a MUST read...</div>
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<a href="http://www.kurzweilai.net/cambridge-university-tohisba-zoe-the-emotional-avatar-of-the-future">Cambridge University & Toshiba | Zoe the emotional avatar of the future</a>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-28952664133965421012015-02-14T23:53:00.001+01:002015-03-04T17:22:11.285+01:00The parody and contradiction of robotics science<div style="text-align: left;">
The parody...</div>
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The contradiction...<br />
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</div>Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-49883205463777585412015-02-04T22:32:00.000+01:002015-02-04T22:32:45.524+01:00Wild encounters<div style="text-align: center;">
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And this summarized that day's lesson of father's kangoroo to the child kangoroo, on dealing with annoying flying creatures even if you are not biologically engineered to deal with this kind of situations.</div>
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It is called <i>improvisation</i>...</div>
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-33393717233054538912015-01-06T23:59:00.000+01:002015-04-23T12:06:27.202+02:00Are we robots ourselves?<div style="text-align: justify;">
Perhaps this is not the most common question one may ask to him/herself. The original question that i posed to myself was whether we will eventually be able to build robots as we envision them today. Is such a goal really feasible, it is realistic?</div>
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Below is the definition of the word "<span style="color: #990000;"><b>Robot</b></span>", quoted from different on-line dictionaries:</div>
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- <i><a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/robot">A machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer.</a></i></div>
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<i>- <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/robot">A person who acts and responds in a mechanical, routine manner, usually subject to another's will; automaton.</a></i></div>
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and so on... The origin of the word "Robot" is from Czech, literally meaning "<b>forced labor</b>".</div>
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The above two definitions are particularly interesting. Because they both clearly suggest that one can immediately turn himself into a robot if he simply put himself at the service of an external authority-power. </div>
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Afterwards, the degree to which somebody is more skillful and effective compared to others in doing things automatically and repeatedly, only concerns how good or bad robot he or she is. It is not so much a matter of the quality of the "forced labor" to actually be a robot. This only affects the level of responsibility that will be appointed to the voluntary human robot.</div>
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So i ask again, are we robots ourselves? I think the answer is undeniable. Human <i>behavior</i> tends to be identical to the very definition of robot. But is this actually truly human or not? Or better, are we still in the state of robots before having accomplished to express our pure human nature?</div>
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We are trying to build artificial robots, and still we seem not to have accomplished much of our expectations. We all however become robots whenever we give away our own will to someone else's and provide our skills to another's service.</div>
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Given the current status, it seems to me more likely that we are going towards a robotization of ourselves. Metaphorically and literally...</div>
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As of the time of this writing, the hour is late. Time for me to recharge...<br />
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Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-12184594237594696012014-12-09T20:37:00.000+01:002014-12-09T20:37:26.013+01:00MiP toy robot<div style="text-align: justify;">
Quite a toy! Wouldn't you love to see the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QkvNHxdyCM">battle</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4W_DlEIFMc">stacking</a> mode on a human-sized robot? </div>
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For those having crazy christmas gift ideas, check out the full description <a href="http://www.wowwee.com/mip/">here</a>.</div>
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Note: i don't know in which of the blog categories to put this post, but depending on how many of you will see it and share it i will look into creating an appropriate new blog category. So... you know what you have to do ;-)</div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-49512320636351269972014-11-01T21:15:00.001+01:002014-11-01T21:17:29.102+01:00Robots at their infancy<div style="text-align: justify;">
The use of robots nowadays has already "escaped" from the realm of industry and is now becoming available to the citizens. We can find today commercial robots for various uses at very low cost that come together with tele-operation interfaces designed for untrained users or other which are programmable.</div>
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Robots are also in use by the military, space exploration, civil security and fire-protection at a small scale, but it seems that their integration will proceed further in view of their advantages over humans.</div>
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This, of course, has a different meaning for each particular case, but at the basis of all we can recognize <i>cost</i> and <i>responsibility</i>.</div>
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Regarding cost, it appears as a natural consequence if a robot substitutes a human, given that both can do equally well the respective job but the robot construction and maintenance is much more cheaper. Well... at least if that does not concern your job and only if the substitution of the human by the robot means that the respective product will be cheaper for you, the consumer. </div>
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If that's the case, what about the unlucky man/woman that will loose his/her job because of the robot? Before answering that question, consider if you prefer to pay the more expensive product/service given by the man or the less expensive product/service given by the robot. If you are a philanthropist and prefer to save the man's job, what do you think that the rest of the society will prefer? You may start to think now, that the substitution of the man is inevitable, if not necessary. You may even become positive if you think that for the construction and maintenance of the robot, other men will have to work and new jobs will be have to be created.</div>
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In any case, the relation between production cost of a robot/machine and human labor cost seems to have a well-understood basis and a long history today, as it has started some centuries now with the industrial revolution.</div>
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But the use of robots outside the factory and in particular within human society has and will have very serious new implications. Within the small, constrained boundaries of a factory, the notion of <i>responsibility</i> is very clear and <i>accountability</i> for the operation of robots is strictly within the limits of the company.</div>
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Unfortunately, we are not yet ready to understand these concepts for robots that are at the hands of consumers and in general out there in the open world (see earlier posts <a href="http://vision-robotics.blogspot.com/2014/10/beginning-of-new-era-air-drone-causes.html">Beginning of a new era</a> and <a href="http://vision-robotics.blogspot.com/2014/10/beginning-of-new-era-ii-sunbathing-will.html">Beginning of new era II</a>). With robots being produced at a global scale and without any regulation for permission of use, anybody with good gaming skills can become a robot owner and user.</div>
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I truly do not wish that as a society we will need to realize the potential of this technology through an unfortunate event, but i fear that the freedom and lack of control for use of this technology will sooner or later lead to such an outcome.</div>
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The source of the following video is from euronews channel and is about a series of air drone flights in the surroundings of several nuclear plants around France, which are currently under investigation with no information yet about the purpose of those flights or their operators. </div>
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Is it about naive enthousiasts that just want to draw attention and try something daring, or is there something more serious behind such actions? Whatever the answer, now is the time to see robotics from a very serious perspective before we need to pay the cost of negligence. The days of innocence will soon be over.</div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6532174431348914708.post-27599008733940388262014-10-21T15:19:00.000+02:002014-10-21T15:19:15.561+02:00Beginning of new era II: Sunbathing will never be the same again<div style="text-align: justify;">
This is what happens when air drone enthusiasts "accidentally" happen to fly over unwary citizens... in France.</div>
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You are advised NOT to try this at home (i meant the sunbathing on the terrace).</div>
Panagiotis Papadakishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01240342036800554376noreply@blogger.com1