Posts Tagged ‘UBot’

MIT Media Lab’s Nexi robot drops by Milano Senior Center in Melrose

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

The Melrose Free Press reports Nexi, the MIT Media Lab’s emotion-displaying robot, visited the Milano Senior Center earlier this week. Media lab researchers tagged along to do research on how the robot –a white plastic, emotive head perched atop DigitRobotics UBot — interacted with the elderly.

One woman, who declined to give her name but said she’s a regular at the Milano Senior Center, said Nexi is “interesting” and that other seniors were “intrigued, like I am.”

Asked if she thought Nexi could be used as a senior’s assistant, helping out around the house, the woman said it made her think more of technologies such as artificial appendages and the robots that now do much of the work in car factories.

“To me it’s almost like something I never would have anticipated, but now I would take it very much for granted. Why not?” she said.

MIT working on Robot Operating System

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

MIT, Stanford and the Technical University of Munich are working together to develop the Robot Operating System, an open-source OS that could help robots and roboticists collaborate, according to New Scientist:

This desire has its roots in frustration, says Brian Gerkey of the robotics research firm Willow Garage in Menlo Park, California. “People reinvent the wheel over and over and over, doing things that are not at all central to what they’re trying to do.”

For example, if someone is studying object recognition, they want to design better object-recognition algorithms, not write code to control the robot’s wheels. “You know that those things have been done before, probably better,” says Gerkey. But without a common OS, sharing code is nearly impossible.

And from the comments, a possible down side:

Lets hope its 100% virus proof.

Hacked robots could be a problem well before the self aware ones decide to “KILL ALL HUMANS!”

The article is populated by a cast of characters from the New England robotics scene — MIT, UMass Amherst and DigitRobotics’ UBot, Brown researcher Chad Jenkins, and Barrett Technology CEO William Townsend and the company’s WAM arm. 

After the jump, watch video of the UBot at the UMass Amherst robotics lab last summer. (more…)

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