DailyDirt: Robots Mimicking Humans...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Everyone universally hated 'Clippy' when it popped up and tried to be helpful. So imagine the hate that could arise if a humanoid robot wondered around and tried to be helpful all the time. Thankfully, the field of robotics is not quite up to letting such a machine loose on the general population, but plenty of researchers are working on how to improve human-bot relations. C3PO has some early ancestors in a few of the following links. By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
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Filed Under: attention, expressions, hmi, robots
Companies: geminoid


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:22pm

    I think you linked to the wrong video with the second link. That's not a robot, it's just some guy blinking.

    ...waaaait a minute... :O

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:29pm

      Re:

      Heh... maybe that robot is not as creepy as I thought.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        Matt Jones (profile), 24 Mar 2011 @ 9:56pm

        Re: Re:

        It took me a few seconds to register what I was looking at. It was actually the unusually shiny eyes that did it.

        The first time it quickly shifted expressions made me jump a bit. Definitely creepy.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:31pm

    The problemm with Clippy was that he was so annoyingly cheerful. When I'm banging my head against the wall over a technical problem, I don't need rainbows and unicorns. I just want the answer.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:32pm

    You know, I had to crush and squeeze on the tube to get to work this morning, and looking at the inconsiderate behaviour of people, the title makes me shudder....

    It's not enough that we have inconsiderate people, now we want to make inconsiderate machines too?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Nicola, 24 Mar 2011 @ 6:43pm

    Some cool robots mimicking humans content

    Here's a video from Edinburgh Uni on robots mimicking humans:

    http://vidiowiki.com/watch/e5qw4kp/Robots_Mimicking_Humans

    There's also a map underneath which links out to other content on uncanny valley, using robots to treat autistic children etc... Quite interesting.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 24 Mar 2011 @ 10:53pm

    Geminoid DK

    Definitely starting to climb out of the Uncanny Valley...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Andrew D. Todd, 25 Mar 2011 @ 3:30am

    Dumb Robots.

    Well, I think the future is in large numbers of dumb, but cheap, robots.

    Let me give you an example. America's railroads use about a million freight cars, half owned by the railroads, and half owned by the shippers. These freight cars, typically costing about $100,000 each, have RFID tags, allowing them to be identified and counted by trackside sensors, but most of the cars haven't any more electronics than that. They have a crude pneumonic-mechanical braking system, which uses the same air pipe for control and power, so there are certain condition under which the brakes cannot be applied. This sometimes leads to runaway accidents, in which the train, under the influence of gravity on a one-percent grade, accelerates to seventy miles an hour before hitting something or derailing. There are various levers, faucet valves, and hand-cranks on each car, which have to be set by hand, not to mention hooking up the air hoses between cars to enable the braking system.

    Under the circumstances it is quite common for small rail shipments, of _only_ a hundred or two hundred tons, to move at five or six miles an hour, net speed from shipper to recipient, over a distance of, say, a thousand miles. The cars spend most of their time sitting in railroad yards, waiting for someone to come and manually work their levers. If you want your goods delivered at a net speed of thirty miles an hour or more, you have to make up a shipment of several thousand tons, enough to charter a special train, a "unit train." That's fine for the electric power industry, getting its shipments of coal, and it works for the container shipping companies, who really want a kind of ship canal leading from the west coast to Chicago, but outside of those specialized sectors, and a few others, most people don't find it practical to employ unit trains. They use trucks instead. If each railroad freight car were fitted with the equivalent of two or three garage-door openers, that would transform the railroad freight car, because it would no longer be necessary for train crews to walk for hundreds of yards along the length of the train, manually doing something to each car. It would be possible for the railroads to do a wide range of business which is now done by trucks.

    The equipment in question is unbelievably dumb. Most people would not consider it a robot. But it works.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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