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AIDA – Affective Intelligent Driving Agent

Will an expressive robot who winks and smiles make it easier for drivers to navigate? This is exactly the question that researchers at MIT are trying to answer.

AIDA’s expressive behaviors are designed to endear the device to you as it helps in your daily navigation. The robot learns your daily commute and which areas you frequent for which purposes.

For example, if you always head to a particular district in your city around dinner time, it will assume you like to eat dinner there. After it memorizes your commute, it will automatically plug in your route to work when you get into the car on a weekday morning. If you go to a hotel for a dalliance every Thursday at noon, it will probably give you a wink and a knowing grin as it maps the route for you.

More crucially, it takes in data about local events and traffic conditions, and will route around those potential obstructions. It looks at the condition of your car, and might include a stop at a gas station if your tank is low.
Current navigation systems include many of these functions. Traffic data and detouring is included in cars such as the Ford Taurus. And traffic data aggregators such as Inrix and Navteq include event data to let you know when there’s a game at the local stadium, for example.

Car companies such as Nissan are also experimenting with robots in the car.

In a presentation on Thursday, October 14 2009, Panasonic unveiled a number of prototype robots at its research lab in Osaka, Japan. A wide range of robots were introduced, including a robust robotic arm for home use, robotic wheel chairs and hospital robots, as well as a number of industrial robots.

The video below is a summary of what was introduced.

This is not exactly a robot – but its close enough and very interesting.

Intelligent Information Lab at Northwestern University has designed a chatbot that can create a story line (report) out of existing stats available for any sporting game. By analyzing the data, StatsMonkey is capable of reporting on the game without the need for human intervention.

Story via Courant Report.

The Firefighters Assistant Robot, by South Korea’s Hoya Robots, can operate up to 320 ft, survive a fall of more than 6 ft, and is water resistant.

Hoya Robot - South Korea - Firefighter Assistant Robot

The robot’s main use is to go into burning buildings to assist firefighters in reconnaissance mission – and hopefully protecting their lives.

Check out the video after the jump:

The robot, more than two years in development, will be shown for the first time at the International Robot Exhibition 2009 (iRex) in Tokyo in November.

Warrior, by iRobot, has a new video on their website. Unfortunately, it can’t be embedded – but its certainly worth a look.

http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=480

Guns on robots have always made me nervous. But there is no denying that having a high flying sniper at your disposal can be invaluable in a number of combat scenarios.

So without further adieu – meet ARSS (Autonomous Rotorcraft Sniper System) – a sniper (helicopter) robot being tested by the US Army.

The challenge of this robot is to have a stabalized gun turret as the helicopter hovers. That job went to Space Dynamics Lab at Utah State University, where they mounted a sniper riffle capable of shooting 7-10 rounds per second along with a high resolution camera, all enabling the operator on the ground to pull the trigger.

And of course as the army likes to do these days, the controll station uses a modified Xbox controller.

Via RoboDynamics Blog.

Rovio telepresence robot by Wowwee

Rovio is one of the first consumer grade telepresence robots out there, introduced at CES 2008 by Wowwee Robotics.

You can think of Rovio as a mobile webcam, where the user can access the robot over the internet and see a video stream broadcasting from the robot’s camera. The user also has the ability to move the robot around (say from room to room) and monitor, survey, or inspect things around the house. Rovio is very small and the camera is about 6″ off the floor – though a tilting mechanism allows you to look up as well.

Rovio user interface screenshot

Telepresence robots are nothing new; NASA has been sending robots all over the universe for at least 30 years now. More recently we sent two mobile robots named Spirit and Opportunity to the surface of Mars. Controllers on earth move the robot around on the surface of Mars and receive high resolution images (and video) from the robot’s cameras. We also did this back in ‘97 – sending the Sojourner robot to Mars. But what is particularly interesting about this robot is its use of the NorthStar navigation system from Evolution Robotics. The NorthStar system enables the robot to autonomously navigate. For example, the user can command the robot to find its base station and recharge instead having to drive the robot to there. I will write about the NorthStar system at length on another post – but for the time being – I believe this is the first deployment of NorthStar in a consumer telepresence robot.

Some questions to ponder:

• What do you guys think about telepresence robots?
• How much would you pay for a small consumer telepresence robot and how would you use it?
• How much value does autonomous navigation add to the robot?

Here’s an interesting robot from Japanese robotics company Little Island.

Standing at approximately 27″ tall the Wedding Bot sits prominently at the head of your wedding reception and greets your guests. Equipped with speech recognition and a variety of touch sensors, the Wedding Bot can be cajoled into telling “secret” stories about the groom, livening up the party.

At only $2,500 you may be able to convince your significat other that you should forgo the flower arrangements and have the robot greet your guests.

Via CNET.