Geminoid Robot Expression

Robots nowadays can mimic human face expression. Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro from the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratory in the Osaka University has designed a copy of himself and a smiling female android. Both robots have human-like face expression. It is quite a breakthrough in humanoid robots. He made many robots to copy human so he calls the robots "Geminoid" which comes from "Gemini" or twin.

Making humanoid robot to be more and more like human is a long journey. So IEEE Spectrum has a photo gallery of "Ode to the Uncanny Valley".

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Ishiguro & The Geminoid

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The smiling female android

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The geminoid robots are also good experimental subjects in cognitive research or neuroscience. I will made another post about the cognitive research on my other blog.

AR Drone: Augmented Reality Flying Robot

AR Drone is a flying robot which has 4 propellers, two cameras and can be controlled with device with WiFi, for example iPhone.

This drone use two cameras to know its position and then to build Augmented Reality. The drone is robust against the wind. It can transform its surrounding into augmented reality for iPhone.

It is said that the AR Drone is future of AR gaming industry.

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More about the Drone can be seen from IEEE Spectrum article.

The way robot play music in 2009

I read two articles from IEEE Spectrum. One is from John Boyd about robot which can play music. The robot play flute. The other is the videos of the robot. The robot is from Takanishi Laboratory in Waseda University, Japan.

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The robot learns music from human.

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The robot plays music.

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It is a wonderful breakthrough in machine intelligence.

To make an orchestra, a person should cooperate with others. I hope research in machine intelligence and swarm intelligence can make a better performance the next 10-20 years.