Read the Beforeitsnews.com story here. Advertise at Before It's News here.
Profile image
By Alton Parrish (Reporter)
Contributor profile | More stories
Story Views
Now:
Last hour:
Last 24 hours:
Total:

Freaky, Deaky! First Glimpse Of New Humanoid Robot, One Year Old Roboy Learns Like A Human Baby

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.


 

 

 
The world is getting a long-awaited first glimpse at a new humanoid robot in action mimicking the expressions of a one-year-old child. The robot will be used in studies on sensory-motor and social development – how babies “learn” to control their bodies and to interact with other people.

Diego-san’s hardware was developed by leading robot manufacturers: the head by Hanson Robotics, and the body by Japan’s Kokoro Co. The project is led by University of California, San Diego full research scientist Javier Movellan.

 
Movellan directs the Institute for Neural Computation’s Machine Perception Laboratory, based in the UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). The Diego-san project is also a joint collaboration with the Early Play and Development Laboratory of professor Dan Messinger at the University of Miami, and with professor Emo Todorov’s Movement Control Laboratory at the University of Washington.

Movellan and his colleagues are developing the software that allows Diego-san to learn to control his body and to learn to interact with people.

“We’ve made good progress developing new algorithms for motor control, and they have been presented at robotics conferences, but generally on the motor-control side, we really appreciate the difficulties faced by the human brain when controlling the human body,” said Movellan, reporting even more progress on the social-interaction side. “We developed machine-learning methods to analyze face-to-face interaction between mothers and infants, to extract the underlying social controller used by infants, and to port it to Diego-san. We then analyzed the resulting interaction between Diego-san and adults.” Full details and results of that research are being submitted for publication in a top scientific journal.


While photos and videos of the robot have been presented at scientific conferences in robotics and in infant development, the general public is getting a first peak at Diego-san’s expressive face in action. On January 6, David Hanson (of Hanson Robotics) posted a new video on YouTube athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=knRyDcnUc4U#!.

“This robotic baby boy was built with funding from the National Science Foundation and serves cognitive A.I. and human-robot interaction research,” wrote Hanson. “With high definition cameras in the eyes, Diego San sees people, gestures, expressions, and uses A.I. modeled on human babies, to learn from people, the way that a baby hypothetically would. The facial expressions are important to establish a relationship, and communicate intuitively to people.”

Diego-san is the next step in the development of “emotionally relevant” robotics, building on Hanson’s previous work with the Machine Perception Lab, such as the emotionally responsive Albert Einstein head (see video on Calit2 YouTube channel).

The video of the oversized android infant was picked up by the popular online technology magazine, Gizmag, with a Jan. 7 article titled “UCSD’s robot baby Diego-san appears on video for the first time,” written by Jason Falconer.

In his article, Falconer writes that Diego-san is “actually much larger than a standard one year old – mainly because miniaturizing the parts would have been too costly. It stands about 4 feet 3 inches (130cm) tall and weighs 66 pounds (30kg), and its body has a total of 44 pneumatic joints. Its head alone contains about 27 moving parts.”

 

The robot is a product of the “Developing Social Robots” project launched in 2008. As outlined in the proposal, the goal of the project was “to make progress on computational problems that elude the most sophisticated computers and Artificial Intelligence approaches, but that infants solve seamlessly during their first year of life.”

For that reason, the robot’s sensors and actuators were built to approximate the levels of complexity of human infants, including actuators to replicate dynamics similar to those of human muscles. The technology should allow Diego-san to learn and autonomously develop sensory-motor and communicative skills typical of one-year-old infants.

“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view,” explained principal investigator Movellan in a 2010 Q&A with the Japan-based PlasticPals blog. “It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”

The researchers are interested in studying Diego-san’s interaction with the physical world via reaching, grasping, etc., and with the social world through pointing, smiling and other gestures or facial expressions.

As outlined in the original proposal to the NSF, the project is “grounded in developmental research with human infants, using motion capture and computer vision technology to characterize the statistics of early physical and social interaction. An important goal is to foster the conceptual shifts needed to rigorously think, explore, and formalize intelligent architectures that learn and develop autonomously by interaction with the physical and social worlds.”

According to UCSD’s Movellan, the expression recognition technology his team developed for Diego-san has spawned a startup called Machine Perception Technologies (MPT). The company is currently looking for undergraduate interns and postgraduate programmers. “We like UCSD students because they tend to have a strong background in machine learning.”

The project may also open new avenues to the computational study of infant development and potentially offer new clues for the understanding of developmental disorders such as autism and Williams syndrome.

As noted in the Gizmag article, Diego-san won’t be the only child-like robot for long. This spring Swiss researchers will demonstrate their nearly 4-foot-tall Roboy robot toddler (with a face selected via a Facebook contest!).

 
Contacts and sources: 

University of California, San Diego



Before It’s News® is a community of individuals who report on what’s going on around them, from all around the world.

Anyone can join.
Anyone can contribute.
Anyone can become informed about their world.

"United We Stand" Click Here To Create Your Personal Citizen Journalist Account Today, Be Sure To Invite Your Friends.

Humic & Fulvic Liquid Trace Mineral Complex

HerbAnomic’s Humic and Fulvic Liquid Trace Mineral Complex is a revolutionary New Humic and Fulvic Acid Complex designed to support your body at the cellular level. Our product has been thoroughly tested by an ISO/IEC Certified Lab for toxins and Heavy metals as well as for trace mineral content. We KNOW we have NO lead, arsenic, mercury, aluminum etc. in our Formula. This Humic & Fulvic Liquid Trace Mineral complex has high trace levels of naturally occurring Humic and Fulvic Acids as well as high trace levels of Zinc, Iron, Magnesium, Molybdenum, Potassium and more. There is a wide range of up to 70 trace minerals which occur naturally in our Complex at varying levels. We Choose to list the 8 substances which occur in higher trace levels on our supplement panel. We don’t claim a high number of minerals as other Humic and Fulvic Supplements do and leave you to guess which elements you’ll be getting. Order Your Humic Fulvic for Your Family by Clicking on this Link , or the Banner Below.



Our Formula is an exceptional value compared to other Humic Fulvic Minerals because...


It’s OXYGENATED

It Always Tests at 9.5+ pH

Preservative and Chemical Free

Allergen Free

Comes From a Pure, Unpolluted, Organic Source

Is an Excellent Source for Trace Minerals

Is From Whole, Prehisoric Plant Based Origin Material With Ionic Minerals and Constituents

Highly Conductive/Full of Extra Electrons

Is a Full Spectrum Complex


Our Humic and Fulvic Liquid Trace Mineral Complex has Minerals, Amino Acids, Poly Electrolytes, Phytochemicals, Polyphenols, Bioflavonoids and Trace Vitamins included with the Humic and Fulvic Acid. Our Source material is high in these constituents, where other manufacturers use inferior materials.


Try Our Humic and Fulvic Liquid Trace Mineral Complex today. Order Yours Today by Following This Link.

Report abuse

    Comments

    Your Comments
    Question   Razz  Sad   Evil  Exclaim  Smile  Redface  Biggrin  Surprised  Eek   Confused   Cool  LOL   Mad   Twisted  Rolleyes   Wink  Idea  Arrow  Neutral  Cry   Mr. Green

    Total 1 comment
    • phoenix rising

      Why bother? We have plenty of real babies.

    MOST RECENT
    Load more ...

    SignUp

    Login

    Newsletter

    Email this story
    Email this story

    If you really want to ban this commenter, please write down the reason:

    If you really want to disable all recommended stories, click on OK button. After that, you will be redirect to your options page.