Farewell John McCarthy

Farewell Dennis Ritchie

World Wide Web for Robots

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:

http://www.ros.org/wiki/roboearth

From BrainStorming to BrainDriving

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.

PANORAMA 3D shape descriptor applied in medical image analysis

To my pleasant surprise, a study on medical image analysis drew my attention today that found particularly useful my earlier work on 3D shape descriptors for 3D shape matching, and in particular the work described within the paper "PANORAMA: A 3D shape descriptor based on panoramic views for unsupervised 3D object retrieval".

The respective work titled as "3D Shape Analysis of the Knee Extensor and Flexor Muscles in Patients with COPD using Mesh Projection-based Features", by Hengameh Mirzaalian, Ghassan Hamarneh, Bahareh HajGhanbari and W. Darlene Reid, used and extended the PANORAMA descriptor in order to match patients MRI of thigh muscles against a database of muscle instances.

Referring to their paper:

"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.

Robots Manufacturers

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.

Willow Garage

iRobot

Aldebaran

Mobile Robots

BlueBotics

KUKA
ROBAI
ENERGID
ST ROBOTICS
LYNX MOTION
MOTOMAN ROBOTICS
ABB
Crust Crawler
Kraft Telerobotics
Robotiq

In time, i will try to keep this above list up-to-date and i would certainly appreciate your feedback.

I would distinguish the following prominent categories of robots:

• Rescue Robots.
• Military Robots.
• Home Robots.
• Service Robots.
• Research Robots.
• Entertainment Robots.
• Space robots.

And i will finish this post, with perhaps the most famous robots song (and quite old).

Sebastian Thrun's talk on Google's driverless car

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.