Robots
All posts relating to robots.
Social Robots and Social Networks
(Image: Mixed Reality Lab/National University of Singapore)
A core theme of Robots and Avatars concerns how young people might negotiate their identities online in the future. For many, the multi identities that virtual spaces create afford them a certain freedom. This brings with it empowerment and new possibilities for the ways that they craft their social spaces. The energy and openness that many young people show when talking about these questions should certainly be celebrated but questions of online credibility, security and cyber-bullying must of course be discussed as well. Petimos, due to be launched later this year, are aimed at 7 to 10-year-olds and are designed to place checks on the processes of interacting online, particularly through social networks.
Children will only be able to accept new online “friends” if their Petimos are brought into physical contact first, to guard against cyberbullies and paedophiles masquerading as children. The devices work in conjunction with an online social network called Petimo-World in which they are represented by avatars. By squeezing their physical Petimos, or pressing buttons on them, children can send messages or “gifts” to their online friends.
Parents are notified each time a friend request is made and can block approaches that concern them, so children only see and interact online with the avatars of approved friends.
“Internet and text-based communication is only a small part of human communication that we have evolved with,” says the device’s inventor, Adrian David Cheok at the National University of Singapore. “I want to use new media to help develop more natural human forms of communication. Petimo is one step in this direction.”
A study published in January by the California-based Kaiser Family Foundation found 18 per cent of 8 to 10-year-olds in the US use social networking sites. My Secret Circle, Yoursphere and FaceChipz are sites used by children in this age group. Other surveys suggest that as many as 3 in 10 children have been subjected to bullying while online.
In March, leading UK police officers called on social networking sites to place a standard “panic button” designed by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre on all pages.
Parents who took part in tests of Petimo in Singapore this year said the need for children to physically meet those who they wished to interact with online helped ease their fears about the risks posed by strangers.
While the devices will initially only be used with Petimo-World, Cheok hopes that eventually they could be used to provide safer access to other social networks.
Jennifer Perry of E-Victims, a group in the UK that helps victims of online crime, says the system’s appeal might be limited if children get bored with the restricted content of Petimo-World. “Children young enough to be content with a walled garden approach and its limitations will probably be too young to be seriously interested in the chat element,” she says.
Source: New Scientist
Mobile Phone Robot
Canadian researchers trying to integrate robots into our lives have come up with a pair of dancing, crying mobile phone ‘bots. The robots, called Callo and Cally, are mobile phones with limbs.
Cally stands about 18cm high and walks, dances and mimics human behavior. Callo stands about 23cm tall, and his face, which is a cell phone display screen, shows human facial expressions when he receives text-messaged emotions. When he receives a smile emoticon, Callo stands on one leg, waves his arms and smiles. If he receives a frown, his shoulders slump and he will cry. If he gets an urgent message, or a really sad one, he’ll wave his arms frantically.
PhD student Ji-Dong Yim and Prof Chris D. Shaw from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Canada have collaborated to create a robot using the combination of Nokia N82 along with components from a Bioloid kit.
Along with an the ability to move in preprogrammed patterns when receiving phone calls from different numbers, robot is also capable to detect human faces using OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision). Robot uses wireless networking, text messaging and other interactive technologies to communicate human emotions. It’s a “simple avatar system” according to Yim.
The robot’s face, which is actually a phone screen, registers text-messaged emotions as human-like facial express.
“When you move your robot, my robot will move the same, and vice versa, so that we can share emotional feelings using ‘physically smart’ robot phones,” he says in an SFU release.
More videos here.
Robots on the Timetable at the Hi-tech High School
From BBC News – read the full article here.
San Diego’s high tech high school integrates robot making and gaming right into the heart of their curriculum. “Daisy May”, a waist-high robots that scuttles around, scooping balls off the ground and projecting them into a bin, has been designed by students at the school reached the semi-finals of an international competition.
The moment you walk into San Diego’s High Tech High you realise this is a school unlike most others.
Andrew Webb, BBC
David Berggren, High Tech High’s engineering instructor and the person responsible for integrating robots in to the curriculum explains that students “learn through doing, through experiencing, building and creating not so much out of lecturing and testing” and are able to balance their other subjects by learning how to “balance loads” which he thinks reflects how we operate when having to apply skills learnt in school in future jobs and workplaces.
You can read the full article by Andrew Webb Technology reporter, BBC News including videos of the students work here on the BBC News website.
Seven species of robot – Dennis Hong
At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning, all-terrain robots — like the humanoid, soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR — all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab’s incredible technical success.
Dennis Hong is the founder and director of RoMeLa — a Virginia Tech robotics lab that has pioneered several breakthroughs in robot design and engineering.
Surgical Robots
At the Robots and Avatars Forum, Pear Urishima from Apple flagged up the use of the iPhone in terms of health, explaining how doctors could monitor patients statistics in real-time right from their phone. She also showed images of how projections of x-rays and scans could be placed onto human bodies to allow doctors to operate more effectively and precisely. This introduction of the virtual into the health sector marks a significant development in how doctors will carry out their work in the future and highlights the skills that the doctors of the future need to be learning today.
How will this increase in information from benefit the specialised work that doctors and surgeosn do? Will the role of the doctor or surgeon develop to become based soley around virtual interaction and avatars rather than the physical ‘hands on’ approach? These questions are pertinet at South Miami Hosptial in the US where the year just 19 surgeons will be performing over 1,000 robotic surguries.
Since the programme began in 2007 the hospital has become one of the key locations for using robots in surgical procedures, which are known as the Da Vinci Surgical System. Dr. Jonathan Masel, a urologist in the Memorial Healthcare System who does surgery by open, traditional laparoscopic and robotic methods, is convinced the robot is the most precise.
“The more complex the procedure, the more I move to the robot. Its 3D optics are just like the movie Avatar.”
Even though there is still more work to be done in terms of scientifc studies regarding the use robots in surgery – to a layperson the developents are remarkable. The human surgeon sits at a computer console peering into a monitor that gives him or her a virtual view inside the patient’s body that is full-color, three-dimensional and magnified 10 times. Across the room, the robot’s four massive arms wield delicate surgical instruments inside the patient, carrying out the surgeon’s instructions with space-age precision.
“The robot is better,” says Dr. Ricardo Estape, a gynecological surgeon at South Miami Hospital who helped start its robotic program. “You can see what you’re doing so much better than even with open surgery. You can’t stick your head in somebody’s pelvis with open surgery when you’re doing a radical hysterectomy.”dvss-v2
“The robot is amazing,” says Dr. Lynn Seto, a cardiac surgeon who performed 450 robotic heart surgeries at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio before South Miami recruited her to help start its robotic heart program. “The view is so good you actually think you’re inside the body.”
