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[IREX 2011] Your Co-Worker may be a Robot Soon

 One of the coolest demos at IREX was the humanoid industrial robot NEXTAGE by Kawada Industries.  NEXTAGE, which made its debut during IREX two years ago, was designed specifically to work side by side with humans in the assembly line. Since then, about 10 Japanese companies have already implemented this robot in their manufacturing facilities, according to Takakatsu Isozumi, General Manager of the Mechatronics Systems Division at Kawada.  So for workers at these companies, the future is already here.

Two of these companies have made public that they are indeed using NEXTAGE to manufacture their products. One is Hitachi, which implemented NEXTAGE into its hard disk manufacturing line. The other is Glory, where NEXTAGE is busy assembling modules for ATM machines. NEXTAGE takes responsibility for repetitive tasks while humans focus on work that need frequent adjustments. 

The video below taken by science writer Kazumichi Moriyama shows NEXTAGE showing off at IREX many of its skills that it learned in the past two years, answering to the various requests from real customers. The fact that NEXTAGE is a real product being used in real life made it stand out from the other humanoids at IREX which are still in the research phase. The basic model of NEXTAGE costs about 7.5 million yen and typically it will cost around 10 to 12 million yen per unit with customized software and peripherals.  

One of the keywords in humanoid robotics these days is Co-X: Developing robots to become Co-Workers, Co-Inhabitants, Co-Defenders, etc. NEXTAGE is one of the first products that realizes this goal.

So far, Kawada is focusing on the Japanese market, but eventually they are planning to sell NEXTAGE abroad too.

Isozumi-san and NEXTAGE - shoulder to shoulder.

[IREX 2011] These candy colored robots will tell you a story

 There is a new humanoid robot in town!  Meet Matanya from Singapore!

 

 

 What's cute about Matanya is how you can press it's arm down to tell it to continue with the story. It's a little like flipping a page of a book. If you want to listen to a part over again, just press down the other arm. That's what Kenichi Kato, who designed the robot, is doing in this photo. 

 It's the first robotic product from Katotec.  The robot now costs 200,000 yen (about 2,600 dollars) and the business model is to sell stories online. Katotec will sell you its original microcontrollers in case you want to build your own humanoid robot too.

Dr. Dennis Hong talks about Humanoid Robots

RoMeLa is on a roll. This summer, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech, led by Dr. Dennis Hong, took home five major awards from the international robot soccer competition RoboCup 2011. The small humanoid robot DARwIn-OP that they developed won first place in the Kid Size league, and this open source robot is quickly gaining worldwide popularity. Their bigger bipedal robot CHARLI-2 won the Best Humanoid Award (Louis Vuitton Humanoid Cup), making them the first U.S. team to win this title. Moreover, the group is now developing the world's first 2-legged fire fighting robot named SAFFiR for the Navy that will autonomously help humans put out fires on a ship. (The group is also developing a car for blind drivers, but we're going to save that for another story.) We asked Dr. Hong about the past, present and future of his group's humanoid robot research. (Photo credit: Virginia Tech)

Q. First I want to ask about your victory in the RoboCup Humanoid Kid-Size League with the DARwIn-OP. The match between you and the Darmstadt Dribblers was fascinating to watch. What do you think was the key to your victory?

A. Our kid size DARwIn team is a collaborative team between Virginia Tech and University of Pennsylvania. We at Virginia Tech (RoMeLa) are the experts on humanoid robots and system integration, and thus lead the platform development. Prof. Dan Lee at the University of Pennsylvania (GRASP), who is well known in the field of machine learning, and his team lead the software development. We had the best hardware platform with DARwIn-OP, so we decided to work with Dan to bring the best of software and the best of hardware together.  It was a beautiful story of successful collaboration.

Photo: Team DARwIn at RoboCup 2011 (Credit: Virginia Tech)

We know DARwIn-OP's system inside out because we are the ones who developed it. When you develop software, you actually have to know a lot about the hardware. That’s the advantage we had over other teams.

Another reason for the success, I think, is that the DARwIn-OP is a brand new platform whereas for example the Darmstadt team has been using their platform for many years. So I think their platform is starting to see its age. So as you can see in the match, the first half and second half it was 5 to 5 and then after that, during the overtime, it looked like their hardware started to get tired. The motors overheat and then things get “shaky.”

Another interesting side note. I do know that a number of teams are very interested in DARwIn-OP and I believe they are planning to use DARwIn-OP as their platform for RoboCup 2012. This year, the Darmstadt team actually brought one DARwIn-OP unit and they used it in some of the earlier games. We could see that they were testing it. So technically we were not the only team that had DARwIn- OP at this year’s RoboCup.

Q. Can we step back to the beginning of this project? How and when did your research project on DARwIn-OP that was funded by NSF start? And how much was the grant?

A. The DARwIn project started in 2004 without any funding. When I first joined Virginia Tech, I had some startup funds so I started a miniature humanoid project. I’ve been interested in many types of locomotion. Leg-wheel hybrids, 6 legs, 3 legs…. So naturally the next step was to investigate 2 legged robots and I’ve been very interested in human locomotion. I thought the best way to study how humans walk is to build a humanoid robot and try to make it walk. And during that process we’ll get a better understanding about the dynamics and controls of human walking. Then in the future we will be able to use this knowledge to develop better prosthetic legs and those kind of things.

 So that was my main reason I started the DARwIn project. We were NOT thinking about RoboCup at all at that time. And so DarWiN 0 was developed in 2004, in 2005 DARwIn 1, in 2006 DARwIn 2, and then around 2006 or 2007, Prof. Oskar von Stryk at Darmstadt Dribblers saw our robot and invited us to join RoboCup.

Once we started participating in RoboCup, DARwIn started to become popular. Many research laboratories and universities contacted us saying they wanted to use DARwIn for their research and educational tasks but as a university we couldn’t sell it. So I wrote a NSF research proposal with Prof. George Lee at Purdue University, asking that if you can give us the funds, we’ll develop an open source version of DARwIn and give it out to the universities so that we can contribute to the robotics community. We received a total of 1.2 million dollars for a 4 years project. We are in the second year right now.

DARwIn-Op is a fully open source robot which means that the software AND hardware are open source. All the CAD files, the blueprints and documentations on how to make and assemble it are all online for free, so other teams can build it. I already know that some groups are building the robot themselves, but you can also buy it from a company called ROBOTIS.

Q. The NSF grant is for Virginia Tech and Purdue University. How did you get to cooperate with Purdue?

A. I had been talking with Prof. George Lee about humanoid robots and we thought that we have a fantastic opportunity with our DARwIn series so it was an idea that we came up with together to write the proposal. Purdue’s role in the DARwIn project was to try to figure out what the community needs, to set the specifications and what the universities might be able to use it for different types of research. It can be used for network communications, vision processing, autonomous behaviors, locomotion, mobile manipulation - all the robotics disciplines that people are interested in. Then based on those specifications, we designed the hardware and electronics. We brought in Universtiy of Pennsylvania later on to get some help for the software.

Q. How did the company ROBOTIS get involved?

Studying humans through robots - a chat with Prof. Asada

 Professor Minoru Asada of Osaka University in Japan is a leader in the field of “Cognitive Developmental Robotics” which aims to understand the development of human intelligence through the use of robotics. He is well-known as the director of the JST ERATO Project on “Synergistic Intelligence.” (Think CB2 – which stands for Child robot with Biomimetic Body.)  Additionally important facts about him are that he is the vice director of The Japanese Society of Baby Science, an academic group of researchers studying infants, and is one of the founders of RoboCup.
 His goal is to understand humans through robotics and then utilize that knowledge to design a robot that can learn by itself. Now that the 5 year ERATO project is coming to a close this spring, GetRobo asked him about what he wants to do next. (The interview took place in San Francisco during Prof. Asada’s visit to the Bay Area in the end of Nov. 2010.)

Q. What are the achievements of the Asada ERATO project?
 
A. There are many but let me go over some of the highlights of the research done by the 4 groups involved in this project.
 First of all, Prof. Koh Hosoda’s group set out to prove that it’s not just the brain that is controlling human movements but that other parts of the body are computing as well. They developed robots that mimic a 7 month old and 13 month old baby using pneumatic muscle actuators and showed how the spine was playing an important role in controlling crawling.
 Prof. Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s group was able to show through computer simulation how a 25 week old fetus is able to learn about its body by moving its muscles and touching itself inside the womb. We think that in real life this helps the baby in organizing its movement right after birth.
 Plus, we now have constructive proof that a neonatal infant can obtain an image of his own face without any visual data but just through touching. This work was done by Prof. Toshio Inui’s group.
  Last but not least, and perhaps the best known outside of academia, is the research done using the CB2 (pronounced CB square) robot, which was developed by Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro’s group. They taught CB2 how to stand with the help of a human pulling it up. Through this experiment they figured out how to determine whether an attempt to stand was successful or not so that CB2 can improve on its skill.
 The common thread in all these research is that we were able to move one step closer in understanding how we can develop a robot as close to a human being as possible.
 
Q. The CB2 was called “the creepiest robot ever.” What do you think about this?
 
A. We take it as praise because it probably means that the robot looks real. But it’s actually not as eerie as people think. When you actually see it, it’s rather cute. I know reporters who’ve come to see the robot and commented that it’s cuter than they had thought. The photos and video don’t do justice to it. 
 
Q. What are the future plans for CB2?
 
A. Initially we had planned to use it long-term and to integrate the functions that were developed with other platforms, but unfortunately due to some hardware problems, we haven’t been able to do that yet.
 
Q. So what’s next?
 
A. So far we’ve developed 7 robotic baby platforms. The neonatal M3-Neony, Nana-chan (7 month old infant), Noby (9 month), Hitomi-chan (13 month), CB2 (1.5 years old), M3-Kindy (5 years) and M3-Synchy (5 years). We’ve used each platform to conduct research on each stage of a human’s life.  
Next at my lab, we would like to develop a new platform that can be used to do research spanning all these stages. I want to find out about the principle of how humans start to perceive self from others and the mechanism of social development.

 The new platform is named Affetto. Affetto can show various emotional expressions and therefore make it possible for human caregivers to interact with it naturally. This is very important to model the early social development of humans.
 
Q. I read that you are planning to sell the M3-Neony and M3-Synchy platforms. How much are they going to cost and who do you think will be interested in purchasing them?
 
A. M3-Neony will cost 3 million yen and the M3-Synchy 800,000 yen and they will be sold by Vstone. Vstone is planning to develop the necessary software in about a year. Our intention is that cognitive scientists and psychologists will find them useful.    
 Currently, we are conducting a joint research where we are having children with Asperger’s disorder play with the M3-Synchy.
 
Q. When do you think that a self-learning robot will become true?
 
A. That’s a hard question to answer since it depends on what you want the robot to learn. For example, if we suppose that the learning target is vowel imitation, to a certain extent it’s already possible by preparing the right environment.
 But in a real life situation, the robot must deal with various kinds of issues, including the complexity in processing auditory, vision and other sensory information. The many degrees of freedom that the humanoid robots have make the problem even harder. Cognitive functions are inseparable from these sensori-motor issues. 
 Having said that, my hope is that our quest for the design principle of cognitive development will enable us to realize general self-learning robots in 10 years. 

Meet Affetto - A robot with realistic facial expressions

 Hisashi Ishihara, Yuichiro Yoshikawa and Prof. Minoru Asada of Osaka University in Japan have developed a new child robot platform called Affetto. Affetto can make realistic facial expressions so that humans can interact with it in a more natural way.

 Prof. Asada is the leader of the JST ERATO Asada Project that has been working on "Cognitive Developmental Robotics" which aims to understand the development of human intelligence through the use of robotics. (Learn more about the research that led to Affetto through this interview with Prof. Asada.)

 Affetto is modeled after a 1-2 year old child and will be used to study the early stages of humans' social development. There have been earlier attempts to study the interaction between child robots and people and how that relates to social development, but the lack of realistic child appearance and facial expressions hindered caregivers to attend to it in a more natural way.

 The paper describing the development of Affetto's head was published and presented at the 28th Annual Conference of the Robotics Society of Japan.

 You can see the mechatronics inside Affetto, which probably should not be shown to the caregiver before any interaction or EVER.

 

 

 Here are some of the expressions that Affetto can make to share it's emotions with the caregiver.