The BBC have reported that the director of rehabilitation engineering services at NHS Lothian, David Gow , has developed a new prosthetic hand. The design and construction of the artificial hand was undertaken by Touch Bionics, Livingston. The hand has fully articulated finger joints and motors for each digit, allowing it to adapt to the shape of objects. The hands are intended to be available on the National Health Service in two to five years.

The hand is controlled my myoelectric sensors attached to the skin above nearby muscle tissue. There are some useful introductions to myoelectric control at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, New Brunswick, here.

A BBC news video is available here. The BBC news story is here.

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Prof Hiroshi Ishigro of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at the Osaka University Department of Adaptive Machine Systems has been getting a lot of publicity for his android doppelganger. The BBC have a video report here. Pink Tentacle has a host of links to video footage of Ishigro’s RL avatar.

Ishigro wants his (very expensive) androids to offer virtual presence for executives - the 21C corporate jet. While Fortune 500 company CEOs chase IBM’s Sam Palmisano into virtual boardrooms Russian oligarchs and Chinese ministers will flaunt their new status by staging their virtual conferences in real boardrooms. Don’t think geminoids won’t have real bodyguards.

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Science have published an article by Heather Gray, Kurt gray and Daniel Wegner on their research into the attribution of mindedness [Synopsis available at Kurt Gray’s Web site]. The research was based on results from an online survey of 2040 people. The participants ‘averaged 30 years of age and were modally female, white, unmarried, Christian, Democrat, and with some college education’. The survey required the participants to make

… 78 pairwise comparisons on five-point scales of 13 characters for one of 18 mental capacities (e.g., capacity to feel pain) or for one of six personal judgments (e.g., “which character do you like more?”). The characters included seven living human forms (7-week-old fetus, 5-month-old infant, 5-year-old girl, adult woman, adult man, man in a persistent vegetative state, and the respondent him- or herself), three nonhuman animals (frog, family dog, and wild chimpanzee), a dead woman, God, and a sociable robot (Kismet).

Factor analysis reduced the eighteen dimensions of the survey to two, generalised as ‘experience’ and ‘agency’ (see diagram above).

Gray, H.M., Gray, K., Wegner, D.M. (2007) “Dimensions of Mind Perception”. Science 315(5812) p. 619. doi: 10.1126/science.1134475

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An italian research programme is aiming to use androids as therapeutic interlocutors for autistic children:

The FACE (Facial Automaton for Conveying Emotions) … is a life-like artifact intended as a believable human-machine interface that is able to engage in non-verbal communication by imitating and learning the emotional behaviour of an interlocutor. … [FACE] will enable us to verify if the system can help children with autism to learn, identify, interpret, and use emotional information and to extend these skills in a socially appropriate, flexible, and adaptive context. [Pioggia et al (2006:1)]

The FACE system takes stereoscopic samples of faces (one per second), pattern-matching facial expressions using a hierarchical neural network based on Kohonen self-organising maps and a multi-layer Perceptron. The skin of the android is equipped with piezo-electric sensor arrays, and its clothes also send interation data to the control and analysis systems.

Preliminary results indicate that the android is successfully participating in rudimentary social interactions with a small sample group of autistic children.

Pioggia, C., Ferro, M., Sica, M.L. Dalle Mura, Casalini, S., Ahluwalia, A., De Rossi, D. Igliozzi, R., Muratori, F. (2006) Imitation and Learning of the Emotional Behaviour: Towards an android-based treatment for people with autism (Conference Paper)

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Researchers at the University of Washington Neural Systems Group have prototyped a non-invasive neural interface for controlling the actions of a humanoid robot.

The humanoid robot takes care of the lower-level motor control while the operator directs action using the interface.

The Neural Systems Group web pages have more images and videos of the system in operation.

[Via Engadget]

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Wired have reported on a autonomous agent system, produced by Naveen Kuppuswamy of the KAIST robot labs, that can move between a number of hardware substrates including robots and PCs.The agent learns via genetic algorithms and has been constructed to be trained for loyalty and recognisable emotions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Science is reporting the development of a walking robot capable of reassessing its own physiology and adjusting its gait in response to damage (see also ScienceDaily, Scientific American and Physorg).

The research has been done at Cornell university by Hod Lipson and Victor Zykov.

Zykov was involved in an earlier demonstration of self-assembling and self-repairing robots called, Molecubes^TM.

There is a video of the Molecubes^TM in action on Zykov’s homepage.

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Thought I’d upload the links to this great short film before I forgot them. The film is directed by Neill Blomkamp and is a great hybrid of cgi and real footage.

There is a short review and a link to a quicktime movie version on Analogik. A version was also uploaded to YouTube

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It’s an old link but it’s always worth reminding ourselves of the plans people have for our future. The Telegraph reported that police in Liverpool are considering the use of surveillance drones as a countermeasure to anti-social behaviour in housing estates:

Task force leaders are in discussions with the Civil Aviation Authority about the feasibility of sending surveillance drones to hover over problem estates. [source]

However, one interviewee is quoted by the newspaper as saying:

“It’s a waste of time. Everyone round here loves getting chased by the police”

I must admit playing cat and mouse with UAVs does sound more entertaining than hanging around on street corners. Sounds like an ideal way for people to keep out of trouble. I am tempted to think, however, that the annual budget of £1 million for the Anti-Social Behaviour Task Force could be spent on less invasive entertainment.

Some time ago a surveillance drone was produced for just this purpose:

Source

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Korean roboticists have produced a successor to the humanoid robot, Ever-1. Where Ever-1’s complement of 35 servos controlling facial expressions allowed it to ‘express the four emotions of happiness, sadness, excitement and anger’ Ever-2 has 60 motors driving facial expressions and has added ‘fright, discomfort, interest and boredom’ to its repertoire [source].

If you’re interested in emotional expression in robotics see Cynthia Breazeal’s Kismet at the MIT Humanoid Robotics Group for pioneering work.

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