Robot Living

Heather & Nao - photo from Carnegie Mellon

Heather Knight is currently a PhD student at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute.  Before getting to Carnegie Mellon she studied at MIT and even worked at Aldebaran Robotics for a while.

She was kind enough to answer a few questions for us for National Robotics Week.

RL: When you were at MIT did you get a chance to work with Kismet or any of the other cool social robots?

HK: I actually have a playlist of some of my favorite social robot videos, including several I’ve worked on, here: YouTube/Marilyn Monrobot.

As a freshman at MIT, I became a student researcher at Dr. Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robotics Group.  She is the creator of Kismet , and founder of the field of social robots.  You can read her seminal book on the subject, Designing Social Robots.  That book is one of my favorites, right up there with Clifford Nass’s The Media Equation and Rosalind Picard’s Affective Computing.

Feel free to flip through some of the social robot, artistic and technical projects I’ve worked on on MarilynMonrobot.com’s project page.  Cyberflora and the Sensate Bear, part of the Huggable Project, were particularly seminal for me.

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Researchers from MIT and the University of Washington have collaborated to create a quadrotor helicopter that navigates using a Microsoft Kinect.

Autonomous environment mapping helicopters? Just add some weapons and it sounds like a science fiction movie .

Link via (MSNBC)

Imagine a post organic future where there are no humans, only robots,  robots that are left with a text they don’t understand about humans. That is the basic premise behind Death And The Powers: The Robots’ Opera on show now at the Cutler Majestic Theater in Boston.

Composer Tod Machover, MIT’s Media Lab, The American Repertory Theater and the Chicago Opera Theater have all collaborated to create a fantastic new opera with robots.

We had the good luck to see the opening night of the show and it was amazing.

The robots are on mobile bases with a white triangular tiltable heads that can also be raised up higher.  There were also three walls of light that moved around the stage as well.  While we are not sure how the robots navigated the stage, we did notice green lights embedded in the floor of the stage and maybe they used these as some kind of marker for positioning themselves.

Another part of the story  revolved around the lead character being uploaded into The System before he died.  Similar stories have been told before, such as the short film called Clay, part of Robot Stories, or in like the AI in William Gibson’s book Neuromancer that roams cyberspace.

See The Robot’s Opera press release (pdf).

If you live in NYC, check out the Apple store on the Upper West Side tonight to see director Tod Machover explain how he incorporated the technology into his art.

Click through for a few of our photos and a video of the event and if you get the chance do check out this amazing piece of futuristic theater.

Link via (Boston.com)

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This funny ketchup dispensing robot is the work of Bill Fienup and Barry Kudrowitz, two people who have studied at MIT.

Check out more videos at Automato75.com.

Using a nanofabric developed at MIT that absorbs oil and not water, scientists at MIT envision a fleet of Seaswarm robots cleaning up oil spills.

They also state that a swarm of 5,000 Seaswarm robots would take about a month to clean up the oil spill in the size of the one in the Gulf Coast.

Seaswarm is intended to work as a fleet, or “swarm” of vehicles, which communicate their location through GPS and WiFi in order to create an organized system for collection that can work continuously without human support. Because they are smaller than commercial skimmers attached to large fishing vessels, they are able to navigate hard to reach places like estuaries and coast lines. Seaswarm works by detecting the edge of a spill and moving inward until it has removed the oil from a single site before joining other vehicles that are still cleaning. Oil is “digested” locally so that Seaswarm does not need to make repeated trips back to shore, which would dramatically slow collection time.

The nanomaterial can absorb up to twenty times it’s own weight and the material is heated to remove the oil.  The Sea Swarm is powered by solar panels and could operate autonomously for several weeks.  Seaswarm is sixteen feet long and seven feet wide.

The Seaswarm prototype was recently unveiled at the Venice Bieniale’s Italian Pavillion.

Click through for a video.

Link via MIT.edu via (Physorg)
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