4 new NAOs are joining our group

Hi everyone,

We just got 4 new "guys" involve our group. Actually they are really good at acting performance, even dance better than me.

Here is the video demo made by my colleague Inkyu Sa.

Robotic platform that I am playing with.

Here I will list some robotic platforms that I have played with.

1. UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)
a) Penelope equipped with Intel Atom board, stereo vision system, GPS, and INS. Work with Michael Warren.

b) Robin system (worked with Michael Warren and Michael Sheil)

c) Phoenix  equipped with autopilot control board.

d) Quadcopter developed by Inkyu Sa.

Artificial robot can assist human, in particular disable people

I just watched a TV show which is about the way to communicate with disable people whose hearing and speaking sense are lost. To be honest, it is really hard to understand the gesture language by the normal people who have never learned this before. It will be great if the artificial robot serves as a translator.


Nowadays, speaking recognition can help blind people to communicate with some artificial machine, for example, if the blind people want to search something on internet, they just need to speak something and then the contents will be translated into keywords. Object recognition can assist the people with weak vision ability(refer to the LookTel product from IPPLEX), even more it can help normal people to learn new stuff which they never seen before. The similar question is how to help the dumb and deaf people whose vision ability is still ok. As human gesture detection and tracking is a active research field, I wish one day the robot can understand gesture language correctly and then translate them into human understood language and vice verse, which means the robot can be as the bridge between normal people and the disable people.


The possible way I can think is that the robot needs a comprehensive database which stores mapping relationship between gesture symbol and nature language, in addition, it still can learn new mapping information to enrich its capability, which is pretty much like dictionary. And then, image recognition and speaking parse technology should be improved as well.


Hopefully, I would see this kind of robot during my life.

Which humanoid robot runs fastest in the world so far?

Here I just forwarded some interesting article relating to running humanoid robots, such as Toyota's humanoid robot, Honda's ASIMO. But today, researchers from the University of Michigan announced they make a fastest two-legged robot, MABEL, in the world.

MABEL two-legged robot fastest in the world It would appear that we have a new champion in the “what robot can run fastest race”. The two-legged robot MABEL under development for several years at the University of Michigan was recently revealed to reach a top running speed of 6.8 miles per hour or roughly 11 kilometers per hour. This means that MABEL is significantly faster than the previous record holder which was Toyota’s humanoid robot with a top speed of 7 kilometers per hour; Honda’s ASIMO is now in 3rd place with a top speed of 6 kilometers per hour. Another technical achievement behind MABEL and above Toyota’s robot is that MABEL’s gate while walking and running much more closely resembles that of a human. In addition, MABEL jumps 3-4 inches above ground (both legs) when running whereas Toyota’s robot hardly does (it does enough to consider it’s fast walking gate running). One disadvantage is that MABEL is not a complete robot that includes an upper body with arms and a head compared to Toyota’s, Honda’s and other humanoid robots coming out of Korea and Japan. The below video shows MABEL running including some explanation of the related technical achievement. Additional information on the project can be found at the project’s website here. Honda ASIMO Toyota humanoid robot MABEL from UM