RoboCup

Telepresence robotics applications continue to get curiouser and curiouser. For instance, how about grooming your cat via a humanoid robot avatar?

That's what Tokyo-based software engineer Taylor Veltrop did with a Nao robot from Aldebaran Robotics.

Veltrop devised an interesting control apparatus for Nao, a popular research robot known for its RoboCup soccer skills.

He wanted to manipulate Nao from a distance, so a treadmill and Kinect were used to navigate the bot, while a head-mounted display controlled Nao's head while showing its camera feeds. Veltrop could thus see through Nao's eyes.

A Wii remote and the Kinect were used to control Nao's arms, including the task of using a brush to groom a cat. … Read more

Just in time for Christmas, France's Aldebaran Robotics has upgraded its Nao humanoid robot, making it better at obeying orders for the big cleanup.

Nao Next Gen is the latest version of the popular research robot, and it's looking more and more lifelike.

The 23-inch droid has been outfitted with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor and two HD cameras linked to a field-programmable gate array for faster processing of both video streams. Intel Capital led a $13 million investment in Aldebaran earlier this year.

It also boasts better speech recognition with a program called Nuance, allowing Nao to pick out individual words in a conversation. … Read more

America's robot might won the day at the RoboCup 2011 tournament in Istanbul, Turkey, with a team from Virginia Tech dominating the field.

Teams DARwIn and CHARLI from the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory (RoMeLa) are the first U.S. groups to win the adult-size and kid-size classes, taking home bragging rights along with the Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup, a prestigious crystal trophy that was held by Germany and Japan in the past.

The team's 5-foot-tall humanoid robot CHARLI-2 (that's Cognitive Humanoid Autonomous Robot with Learning Intelligence) made its debut in the RoboCup this year, beating Singapore's Robo Erectus 1-0 in a kicking challenge in the adult-size class.

As this video shows, CHARLI-2 moves like a very frail old man. But the robot was already famous last year when Virginia Tech heralded it as "the first untethered, autonomous, full-sized, walking, humanoid robot with four moving limbs and a head, built in the United States."

The lab's miniature humanoid DARwIn-OP, developed with engineering students from the University of Pennsylvania, won the kid-size class, defeating Japanese team CIT Brains 8-1. The final seen in the video below shows that the kid-size matches are far more exciting. … Read more

It seems you can do almost anything with robots and Kinect--perhaps even save lives. Students at the U.K.'s University of Warwick are using the motion controller on a robot that's designed to help find victims in quake-hit buildings.

With a look that seems inspired by "Short Circuit" star Number 5, Warwick's Teleoperated Search & Rescue Robot (PDF) can crawl over obstacles and fit into cramped spaces.

It has six tracks and a sensor-laden "head" on an articulated arm, and is powered by two Roboteq AX3500 motors.

It can use its new Kinect sensor to map terrain in 3D, perhaps identifying areas in a collapsed building where victims could be trapped.

The Kinect is an improvement to past versions of the robot that saves significant sums compared with Lidar laser sensors, which use light to image objects and create maps.

The team also wants to equip the crawler with a manipulator that could help bring food and medicine to trapped victims.

The robot won the European rescue championship at RoboCup last year in Germany, and aims to win this year's world competition in Turkey. … Read more

If you think robots are heartless piles of plastic and silicon, you're correct. But soccer-playing humanoid robot Nao has been evolving by developing "emotions" under a European project and is now being used in the U.S. in sessions to treat autistic children.

Under the recently concluded Feelix Growing project--aimed at designing bots that can detect and respond to human emotional cues--researchers at the University of Hertfordshire's Adaptive Systems Group and other centers have been trying to get Nao to simulate human emotions.

Researcher Lola Canamero and colleagues have been programming Nao--created by Aldebaran Robotics and used worldwide as a research bot--based on how human and chimpanzee infants interact with others. Working with a budget of some $3.2 million, the researchers have been trying to create robots that can be better companions for people.

In a gushing report, the Daily Mail has hailed Nao as "the first robot capable of developing emotions and forming bonds with humans."

Robot fans who remember Sony's robot dog Aibo, discontinued in 2006, will recall that it had a range of synthetic emotions and could "grow" emotionally according to how it interacted with its owner.

It's no surprise that the researchers have also been experimenting with Aibo, including the cyberpup and Nao in a "robot nursery" designed to incubate emotional behaviors. Nao can so far express excitement, anger, fear, sadness, happiness, and pride, and supposedly has the "emotional skills" of a 1-year-old child.

Using its facial-recognition skills, Nao can become attached to people who help it learn, just like a human infant. When confronted with an unfamiliar situation, or when neglected by its human caregiver, Nao can become agitated. It will remember past experiences it interprets as positive or negative. … Read more

Some American robots heading to Singapore to battle it out at the RoboCup 2010 soccer tournament may be as surprising as the U.S. national team in the World Cup. They have a new weapon in their bag of tricks--a physics-based algorithm that lets them calculate where the ball will go so they can bend it like Beckham, or at least like R2-D2.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are confident their robots will outperform rivals in the tournament's Small-Size League because the bots' improved coding takes ball dynamics into account. By predicting how the ball will behave instead of just reacting to it or relying on programmed plays, the bots seem to have an advantage. They might even score through bank shots.

CMU researcher Stefan Zickler, who wrote his thesis on the algorithm while working toward a Ph.D. in computer science, said in a release that robots had never before been able to know when they will lose control of a ball while performing moves like turning and dribbling. The vid below shows a robot programmed with the algorithm outscoring against one without it.

Zickler works on the CMDragons, a team of five cylindrical wheeled robots under 6 inches tall. The group tested an earlier version of algorithm at RoboCup 2009, outplaying rivals until a glitch doused their hopes in the quarterfinals. This time, Dragons leader Manuela Veloso, a computer science professor at CMU, is confident of success, telling the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "I don't see any reason why we won't win." … Read more

The line has been drawn and the goal set.

The RoboCup Federation, a nonprofit organization based in Japan, aims to develop autonomous humanoid robots that are advanced enough to pit themselves against human World Cup champions by 2050.

While we're probably still some way off from the military drones in "Iron Man 2," the organizers of the yearly RoboCup competition, which will take place in Singapore between June 21 and 24, hope the event will fuel interest among students of robotics and artificial intelligence.

At the press conference Thursday morning, we learned from Jonathan Kua that the … Read more

Aldebaran Robotics is showcasing the skills of its pint-size humanoid robot Nao ahead of its planned mass market release in about a year.

Nao is definitely one of the coolest humanoids around that stands a chance of making it into households as a real product. Aldebaran envisions it as "an autonomous family companion."

Fully programmable, the 23-inch bot boasts 25 degrees of freedom, affording it an impressive range of motion. Check it out in Nao's new promo vid after the jump.

Nao can grasp objects with its prehensile hands; process image and sound data; and navigate its environment using its sonars. Multimedia features include high-fi speakers, microphones, and CMOS digital cameras.

The biped runs on an x86 AMD Geocode 500 MHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM, 2GB flash memory, and lithium polymer batteries that last about 90 minutes per charge.

With striking similarities to Sony's discontinued Qrio humanoid, you'd think Nao was made in Japan. Pas du tout. Aldebaran is based in Paris, though Nao can only speak English. … Read more

RoboCup 2007, the international robot soccer, rescue and home chore competition, concluded Sunday night with an awards ceremony, but some are still wondering who won.

The organization used Wikipedia as a central location from which to post results for its different events, but the information from many links remained incomplete as of Monday afternoon. It's left some followers of the event flummoxed.

About 300 teams, comprising 1,700 people from 37 countries, participated in RoboCup 2007, which was held this year at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

The event to promote artificial intelligence and robotics included soccer … Read more