Category robotics

Episode 20 – Paul Dominick Baniqued

Claire talked to Dr Paul Dominick Baniqued from The University of Manchester all about brain-computer interface technology and rehabilitation robotics.

Paul Dominick Baniqued received his PhD in robotics and immersive technologies at the University of Leeds. His research tackled the integration of a brain-computer interface with virtual reality and hand exoskeletons for motor rehabilitation and skills learning. He is currently working as a postdoc researcher on cyber-physical systems and digital twins at the Robotics for Extreme Environments Group at the University of Manchester.

Episode 21 – Sean Katagiri

Claire chatted to Sean Katagiri from The National Robotarium all about underwater robots, offshore energy, and other industrial applications of robotics.

Sean Katagiri is a robotics engineer who has the pleasure of being surrounded by and working with robots for a living. His experience in robotics mainly comes from the subsea domain, but has also worked with wheeled and legged ground robots as well. Sean is very excited to have recently started his role at The National Robotarium, whose goal is to bring ideas from academia and turn them into real world solutions.

Episode 22 – Iveta Eimontaite

Claire talked to Dr Iveta Eimontaite from Cranfield University about psychology, human-robot interaction, and industrial robots.

Iveta Eimontaite studied Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of York and completed her PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Hull University. Prior to joining Cranfield University, Iveta held research positions at Bristol Robotics Laboratory and Sheffield Robotics. Her work mainly focuses on behavioural and cognitive aspects of Human-Technology Interaction, with particular interest in user needs and requirements for the successful integration of technology within the workplace/social environments.

Mickey Li

Claire talked to Mickey Li from the University of Bristol about aerial robotics, building inspection and multi-robot teams.

Mickey Li is a Robotics and Autonomous systems PhD researcher at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and the University of Bristol. His research focuses on optimal multi-UAV path planning for building inspection, in particular how guarantees can be provided despite vehicle failures. Most recently he has been developing a portable development and deployment infrastructure for multi-UAV experimentation for the BRL Flight Arena inspired by advances in cloud computing.

A new study by Missouri S&T researchers shows how human subjects, walking hand-in-hand with a robot guide, stiffen or relax their arms at different times during the walk. The researchers' analysis of these movements could aid in the design of smarter, more humanlike robot guides and assistants.

Humans have always been fascinated by scales different than theirs, from giant objects such as stars, planets and galaxies, to the world of the tiny: insects, bacteria, viruses and other microscopic objects. While the microscope allows us to view and observe the microscopic world, it is still difficult to interact with it directly.

A team of researchers at the University of Toronto has found a way to enhance the visual perception of robotic systems by coupling two different types of neural networks.

One of the key considerations while choosing the perfect set of sensors for your robotic designs include their resistance to ambient situations such as temperature, lights, interferences and obstructions.

Vibrating tiny robots could revolutionize research.

It's easy to believe that robots are stealing jobs from human workers and drastically disrupting the labor market; after all, you've likely heard that chatbots make more efficient customer service representatives and that computer programs are tracking and moving packages without the use of human hands.

The investment reflects BOWE's strategic view of robotics in the future of automation and is a vote of confidence in MOV.AI's innovative approach to robot software.

Eando Binder’s Adam Link scifi series predates Isaac Asimov’s more famous robots, posing issues in trust, control, and intellectual property.

Read more about these challenges in my Science Robotics article here.

And yes, there’s a John Wick they-killed-my-dog scene in there too.

Snippet for the article with some expansion:

In 1939, Eando Binder began a short story cycle about a robot named Adam Link. The first story in Binder’s series was titled “I, Robot.” That clever phrase would be recycled by Isaac Asimov’s publisher (against Asimov’s wishes) for his famous short story cycle that started in 1940 about the Three Laws of Robotics. But the Binder series had another influence on Asimov: the stories explicitly related Adam’s poor treatment to how humans reacted to the Creature in Frankenstein. (After the police killed his dog- did I mention John Wick?- and put him in jail, Adam conveniently finds a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the penny drops on why everyone is so mean to him…) In response, Asimov coined the term “the Frankenstein Complex” in his stories[1], with his characters stating that Three Laws of Robotics gave humans the confidence in robots to overcome this neurosis.

Note that the Frankenstein Complex is different from the Uncanny Valley; in the Uncanny Valley, the robot is creepy because it almost looks and moves like a human or animal but not quite, in the Frankenstein Complex people believe that intelligent robots regardless of what they look like will rise up against their creators.

Whether humans really have a Frankenstein Complex is a source of endless debate. Frederic Kaplan in a seminal paper presented the baseline assessment of the cultural differences and the role of popular media in trust of robots that everyone still uses[2]. Humanoid robotics researchers even have developed a formal measure of a user’s perception of the Frankenstein Complex.[3] So that group of HRI researchers believes the Frankenstein Complex is a real phenomena. But Binder’s Adam Link story cycle is also worth reexamining because it foresaw two additional challenges for robots and society that Asimov, and other early writers, did not: what is the appropriate form of control and can a robot own intellectual property.

You can get the Adam Link stories from the web as individual stories published in the online back issues of Amazing Stories but it is probably easier to get the story collection here. Binder did a fix-up novel where he organized the stories to form a chronology and added segue ways between stories.

If you’d like to learn more about

• robot control and what is appropriate for what types of tasks, see Introduction to AI Robotics, second edition
• Asimov’s Three Laws and whether they really would prevent the Frankenstein Complex, see Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction from Asimov’s I, Robot Stories, and links about Asimov

References

[1] Frankenstein Monster, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster, accessed July 28, 2022

[2] F. Kaplan, “Who is afraid of the humanoid? Investigating cultural differences in the acceptance of robots,” International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 1–16 (2004)

[3] Syrdal, D.S., Nomura, T., Dautenhahn, K. (2013). The Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire – Results from a Quantitative Cross-Cultural Survey. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_27

Eando Binder’s Adam Link scifi series predates Isaac Asimov’s more famous robots, posing issues in trust, control, and intellectual property.

Read more about these challenges in my Science Robotics article here.

And yes, there’s a John Wick they-killed-my-dog scene in there too.

Snippet for the article with some expansion:

In 1939, Eando Binder began a short story cycle about a robot named Adam Link. The first story in Binder’s series was titled “I, Robot.” That clever phrase would be recycled by Isaac Asimov’s publisher (against Asimov’s wishes) for his famous short story cycle that started in 1940 about the Three Laws of Robotics. But the Binder series had another influence on Asimov: the stories explicitly related Adam’s poor treatment to how humans reacted to the Creature in Frankenstein. (After the police killed his dog- did I mention John Wick?- and put him in jail, Adam conveniently finds a copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the penny drops on why everyone is so mean to him…) In response, Asimov coined the term “the Frankenstein Complex” in his stories[1], with his characters stating that Three Laws of Robotics gave humans the confidence in robots to overcome this neurosis.

Note that the Frankenstein Complex is different from the Uncanny Valley; in the Uncanny Valley, the robot is creepy because it almost looks and moves like a human or animal but not quite, in the Frankenstein Complex people believe that intelligent robots regardless of what they look like will rise up against their creators.

Whether humans really have a Frankenstein Complex is a source of endless debate. Frederic Kaplan in a seminal paper presented the baseline assessment of the cultural differences and the role of popular media in trust of robots that everyone still uses[2]. Humanoid robotics researchers even have developed a formal measure of a user’s perception of the Frankenstein Complex.[3] So that group of HRI researchers believes the Frankenstein Complex is a real phenomena. But Binder’s Adam Link story cycle is also worth reexamining because it foresaw two additional challenges for robots and society that Asimov, and other early writers, did not: what is the appropriate form of control and can a robot own intellectual property.

You can get the Adam Link stories from the web as individual stories published in the online back issues of Amazing Stories but it is probably easier to get the story collection here. Binder did a fix-up novel where he organized the stories to form a chronology and added segue ways between stories.

If you’d like to learn more about

• robot control and what is appropriate for what types of tasks, see Introduction to AI Robotics, second edition
• Asimov’s Three Laws and whether they really would prevent the Frankenstein Complex, see Learn AI and Human-Robot Interaction from Asimov’s I, Robot Stories, and links about Asimov

References

[1] Frankenstein Monster, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/frankenstein_monster, accessed July 28, 2022

[2] F. Kaplan, “Who is afraid of the humanoid? Investigating cultural differences in the acceptance of robots,” International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 1–16 (2004)

[3] Syrdal, D.S., Nomura, T., Dautenhahn, K. (2013). The Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire – Results from a Quantitative Cross-Cultural Survey. In: Herrmann, G., Pearson, M.J., Lenz, A., Bremner, P., Spiers, A., Leonards, U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8239. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02675-6_27

At the bottom of the ocean lie lumps of valuable metals such as copper, manganese, nickel and cobalt—materials crucial to accelerating the energy transition.

Instead of elaborately programming a solution, neural networks and deep learning algorithms teach an image processing system to see, recognize and verify objects - in this case smoke.

Meet Sylvia Christie, our education partnerships manager who’s played a leading role in expanding our scholarship programme, which is marking its five-year anniversary.

Meet Sylvia Christie, our education partnerships manager who’s played a leading role in expanding our scholarship programme, which is marking its five-year anniversary.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have engineered a virtual reality (VR) remote collaboration system which lets users on Segways share not only what they see but also the feeling of acceleration as they move. Riders equipped with cameras and accelerometers can feedback their sensations to a remote user on a modified wheelchair wearing a VR headset. User surveys showed significant reduction in VR sickness, promising a better experience for remote collaboration activities.