Robotic Arm (Myo-electric prosthetic upper limb)

This amazing project, completed by students from National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan, involves movement of a robotic hand based on brain signals. The project was funded by the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan and was tested on a 14 year old boy - amputated by both arms.

Emotions

Amazing Cog Playing Drums

Kismet's Expressions

Albert Einstien Hugo Video

ASIMO

ASIMO is a humanoid walking robot made by HONDA. It has a total of 34 DOFs including 3 for head, 14 for arms, 4 for hand, a single for torso and 12 for legs. The robot can walk at around 2.7 km/hr and runs at 6 km/hr. The robot uses rechargeable batteries, servo motors for movement and harmonic speed reducer.

Robotic F.A.C.E (Facial Alerting in a Communication Environment)

This robot, built at MIT, uses the head a toy called Yano. It uses three motors which are driven using six pulse width modulated signal. Consequently it has three DOFs. A PIC microprocessor on an iRX board is used to drive the motors and the sensors. This microprocessor in turn takes commands from a computer and the software for it is written in C. The computer program however is written in C.

Repliee Q2

Repliee Q2 is an updated version of Repliee Q2 and is very humanlike - a pure android. It has been made by Hiroshi Ishiguro and possesses a total of 15 DOFs in the head region for a diverse range of human like behaviors. It can move its hands and torso with a total number of DOFs of 32. It is however fixed at one position and cannot move.

Doc Beardsley

Doc Beardsley is a talking face made at Carnegie Mellon University. It cannot walk but has vision, can understand and speak words. It uses layers of software which generate answers to questions - in case it doesn’t understand a question or doesn’t have an answer it says anything to continue the conversation.

Albert Hubo

Based on Albert Einstein, Albert HUBO is a robot that has 66 DOFs (31 for head motions and 35 for body motions) (J. Oh, 2006). It uses a total of 28 servo motors for the facial expressions and 2 servos for its neck. It also uses 35 motors for imitating various human body motions. The facial expressions include laugh, sadness, angry, etc.

Leonardo

The most expressive robot in the world today, Leonardo has 69 degrees of freedom of which 32 are in the face alone. Although it can’t walk, the robot gesture and is able to manipulate objects. Leonardo can also recognize faces by keeping a buffer of up to 200 temporarily contiguous (or nearly) views of the tracked face. A motor control system to address the needs of many-axis interactive robots, a motor control system has been developed. These controllers allow good dynamic performance by simultaneously supporting both position and velocity feedback. The motor drivers are FET H-bridges and the system is controlled by a custom Soc motion controller implemented in an Xlinx Virtex FPGA.

Cog

Another robot built at MIT, cog is a humanoid robot capable of playing drums, perform oscillatory arm movements, reaching to a visual target, reflex arm withdrawal , visual attention mechanism, visual features detection, face and eye detection, imitating head nods, head and neck orientation behaviors and eye movements (Brooks, 1998). Cog has a total of twenty one DOFs. Twelve DOF in two arms, two in waist, one in torso, three in neck and three in eyes. The ‘brain’ is a network of 200MHz industrial PC computers, while video and audio processing is performed by a separate network of digital signal processors. Also, each joint of the robot is driven by a separate motor controller.

Aryan

Hossein Mobahi, a student from Azad University, Tehran, has created a robot named Aryan quite literally from scratch. Aryan is a vision based robot that can express neutral, anger, surprise and anger. A C based program runs on a PC using Linux, which sends control signals to a digital controller via parallel interfacing. There are a total of 8 DOFs. Aryan is able to detect faces and follows them with its eyes.

Badar

Badar is a robot created by three students at National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Pakistan: Omar Kalim, Syed Muhammad Sami & Ishfaq Zareen.

The robot expresses four basic emotions based on what the observer does. The logic fed into the robot has been realized by a program running on a computer. A digital camera has been used as an image sensor. The program has been written in MATLAB and the code involves modules like skin detection, motion detection, segmentation, face detection, region of interest, emotion calculation, etc. This logic of the program has been transferred to the robot via parallel interfacing. It transfers the code in the physical sense since it actuates some motors and moves them into the desired positions. Motor driver circuits have also been designed to help in this process. Stepper motors have been used for the eyebrows and the horizontal movement of the eyes, while electromagnets have been used for vertical movement of the eyes and a DC motor for the jaw.

The results of the project are more than satisfactory with a success rate of around 83% for face detection, under good lighting conditions. Similarly the success rate for a person recognizing an emotion display is around 64%.

If you have any questions regarding the robot, feel free to ask, since the creators of the robot run this website...

Kismet

Kismet, a robot made at MIT, is capable of interacting in human social interaction and can demonstrate human emotion and appearance.

It uses 4 narrow field cameras and 2 wide field ones. Four Motorola 68332 microprocessors execute the high-level perception system, the motivation system, the behavior system, the motor skill system, and the face motor system.

Vision processing, visual attention and eye/neck control is performed by nine networked 400 MHz PCs. Expressive speech synthesis and vocal affective intent recognition runs on a dual 450 MHz PC and the speech recognition system runs on a 500 MHz PC. The robot can also demonstrate 18 DOFs.

Sparky

Sparky is a mobile robot controlled by a base station (Mark Scheeff, 2000). In essence, a human operator at the base station uses a game controller to send commands, like emotional state and movements, to the robot. A computer (200 MHz Pentium CPU) on board the robot interprets the commands and drives the motors.

Audio and video signals acquired from a microphone and a camera at the robot end are transmitted back to the base station wirelessly and displayed via a monitor and speakers respectively. Sparky’s face points towards any face present and it can express 4 emotions. Also, it employs 10 DOF.

Greetings!

Welcome to robot-human-interaction! Here we discuss robots that interact with humans.

We discuss

• Famous robots like Kismet, Leonardo, etc. that have revolutionized the robot-human relationship
• Best techniques for effective robot building
• Interaction techniques including speech, computer vision, etc
• & just anything about robots - cause we just love them!

Cheers!