Robots from RO-MAN 06

The last few weeks have been very busy. Finally I managed to have a short break before I dive into more geeky research. Funny thing is that I've had lots of things in my mind during these days that i though I might write them down in my blog later when I have time. Now, I have the time but I don't know what to write.So maybe I should leave the writing for another time. I attended the RO-MAN 06 conference last weekend, which is an IEEE conference on social robotics. I uploaded some pictures of me, my new friends and some robots on the exhibition. They are in my gallery. In case you are curious about how the real robot research is going, I will just briefly explain what the robot in the exhibition can do.

This is a humanoid robot. It can have some basic human emotion expressions and some basic behaviours. But so far, it is still in the early developing stage.

This is a guiding robot. The job of the robot is leading the visitors to each post in the exhibition. You can input the location you want to go on the touch screen. There is a human face on the screen that will interaction with you (very simple interaction at the moment). There are two cameras on the robot and the robot can identify different human face so that in the future, if the followers are falling behind, the robot will wait for them or go back to look for the followers.

These little things are called I-Swam. They are animate ants. The work they can do is very impressive. As you can image that each of them can do actually very limited things because you can't build such a little thing with a very complex system. But, they cooperate as the ants society. They share information and communicate so that when are work in a group, they become very powerful.

This is a robot build on the basis of Pioneer PeopleBot (TM). It is a project from COGNIRON. This robot is currently used to analyse how people react toward social robot, such as a home service robot. It can do some impressive things like serving food, hand shaking etc. But I think at the moment, its actions are mainly under human supervision.

This worm-looking robot is developed on the real structure of the neuron system and muscle structure. It can swim in similar way that animals do. It is impressive not in the way of the job it can do but rather the way of how it does it.