It’s just a great idea! She was especially interested in the complexity of solving seemingly simple task – to protect them from direct sunlight. While most people use blinds and similar devices in the lab, Daniela Russ, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to go in an unusual way and built a robot that can move on smooth glass surface of the building and open “umbrella” in front of your window. Continue reading
The increasing intelligence and autonomy of modern robot systems requires new and powerful man-machine-interfaces. For example, a robot’s capability to autonomously recover from error situations corresponds with dynamic adjustments of robot plans during execution. This makes it difficult for an operator to predict and understand the behavior of the machine. Explanations and descriptions of why and how a certain plan has been changed would impose the acceptance of robots.
Descriptions are even more important in error situations which can not be handled autonomously. In this context, natural language is an effective tool of using robots in a more flexible manner. In this article, the joint efforts of the University of Karlsruhe and the University of Saarland to provide a natural language explanation for the error recovery of the autonomous, mobile, two-arm robot, KAMRO are reported.
Useful thing – exoskeleton. I remember reading about it in some sort of fantastic story 60-ies. They used things like the Space Marines fighting the civilization of beetles (later the Americans made a few films and animated series fighters on this topic). Continue reading