Terminator 0.0.1 (alpha)

The French start up Aldebaran-Robotics based in Paris has high hopes for its humanoid robot called NAO. The device is 57 cm high and weighs 4.5 kilograms (about the size of a 6 month old baby) and you may be about to see a lot more of it. The company has sent a simplified version to 16 teams playing in the Robocup humanoid football league this year.

NAO looks an impressive device, judging by the design, which the company has posted on the arXiv today. And others clearly agree. Earlier this year, the company picked up Euros 5 million in venture capital funding to help commercialise the device. The target market is university research labs involved in developing the next generation of software and hardware for robotics.

That’s a smart move because it could make NAO a de facto standard.

NAO doesn’t come cheap, however. A single robot will set you back Euros 10K but that is significantly cheaper than most other humanoids. Fujitsu’s HOAP costs $50K, for instance, and Honda hasn’t been able to put price on Asimo.

The company hopes that economies of scale will bring down the price as production scales up. Eventually it hopes to sell NAO to the public for Euros 4K each.

Better start saving.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0807.3223: The NAO Humanoid: A Combination of Performance and Affordability

Machine Interpretes Your Dreams, Robot Enacts Them

Sleep Waking is an art project that uses EEG and EKG to record brainwaves and heart activity of a sleeping person and feeds them into a humanoid robot (a Kondo KHR-2HV). The robot turns the data into an interpretive dance. In short, the robot dances your dreams. In addition, rapid eye movement is used to control the head of the robot, so if the sleeper’s eye looks left - the robots head looks left.

Live Science reports on the project:

The use of the EEG data is a bit more complex [than the use of rapid eye movements]. Running it through a machine learning algorithm, we identified several patterns from a sample of the data set (both REM and non-REM events). We then associated preprogrammed robot behaviors to these patterns. Using the patterns like filters, we process the entire data set, letting the robot act out each behavior as each pattern surfaces in the signal. Periods of high activity (REM) where [sic] associated with dynamic behaviors (flying, scared, etc.) and low activity with more subtle ones (gesturing, looking around, etc.). The “behaviors” the robot demonstrates are some of the actions I might do (along with everyone else) in a dream.” [LiveScience]

And here’s a video of it, dancing away [Alt].

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The project is the brainchild of Fernando Orellana and Brendan Burns, who used the equipment of The Albany Regional Sleep Disorder Center in New York to record the data.

A robot dancing your dreams. Can’t help but feel inspired by that quip.