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Robots - What Is The State Of The Art In Robotics ?
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This Robot Can Walk On A Tightrope ! !
17 novemberi 2012
If you are a robot lover who hopes to have a mechanical friend that could save your life someday, we've got great news. On the other hand, if you're afraid of a hostile robot takeover, for you the news isn't so great.
Scientists in Japan have built a small humanoid robot that can walk on a tightrope, balancing itself by swinging its arms. Although, it's really more like sliding than walking. Anyway, the good news is that one day your friend might be able to rescue you from danger, if you happen to find yourself stuck somewhere only reachable by tightrope.
Of course, if you're one of those people who keeps a written copy of Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics just in case you need to issue a warning to an overly aggressive vacuum cleaner, this is the time to press the panic button. "And I thought making my house only accessible with tightropes would save me from the robot uprising," wrote a worried user in the comment thread.
Two Robots Create Their Own Language, BBC’s Hunt for Artificial Intelligence
17 novemberi 2012
Zie Two Robots Create Their Own Language, BBC’s Hunt for Artificial Intelligence
In a clip from the BBC Horizon documentary, “The Hunt for AI”, two robots learn how to move their own bodies by themselves, and go on to teaching each other their own language. Scientists at the Neurorobotics Research Laboratory believe that true artificial intelligence can only be achieved by allowing machines to develop and evolve like young children do. The focus of the research project is to explore how “complex grammatical systems and behaviors can emerge in populations of robotic agents.”
Teaching Robots to Learn
Experiments play out like a game where a teacher and observer interact to build a shared vocabulary from the ground up.
Dr. Luc Steels of the NRL explains how one of the robots is attempting to communicate its chosen word for a specific gesture. The “words” they invent begin as random sounds given to a specific action, object, or event. That coupling must then be successfully conveyed to a partner, which involves the observer guessing what the teacher meant. Whenever the observer correctly guesses the word’s definition, it enters into a shared vocabulary that can be used to study further complexities like grammar and tense (do this, then that).
If the project is a success, not only will robots be able to teach one another new words, but it will be possible for people to teach robots words in the same way we do infants. And the grammatical problems that often stump computers in Turing tests may be solved.
AI vs. AI: Two chatbots talking to each other
17 novemberi 2012
Zie AI vs. AI: Two chatbots talking to each other
How it works
The system depicted was created by combining three components: a chatbot, atext-to-speech synthesizer, and an avatar renderer.
Chatbots are machines designed to emulate the conversational abilities of humans, conversing with a human user and generally attempting to convince the user into thinking that the machine is human. In such a scenario, if a sufficiently adept human on one end is fooled into thinking the machine is another human, the machine would be credited as passing the famous Turing Test for intelligence. Over 60 years after its proposal by Alan Turing, there are arguably still no machines capable of passing this test. The chatbot we initially used was Eliza, a prominent early milestone from AI's infancy in the 1960's. This tended to produce fairly boring conversations, so we switched to a much smarter, constantly learning chatbot: Cleverbot. Publicly available on Cleverbot.com, this state of the art chat engine was created by AI researcher Rollo Carpenter, who can be contacted via his company, Existor. Cleverbot will continue to learn, and Existor are soon to add new capabilities aiming at a Turing Test pass sooner than you might expect.
The second piece of the system is the text-to-speech synthesizer, which takes the text generated by the chatbot and creates a spoken, audio version. There are many services able to accomplish this; we chose Acapela because it was easy to use and sounded decent.
The final piece is the avatar renderer, which synthesizes an animated character whose gestures and lips are synced to the sound stream. For this we used Living Actor Presenter.
We tied these three components together in Python, producing a single machine (one of the two screens) that can converse with a user. We then plugged the output of one machine into the input of a second, and the output of the second back into the first, producing endless comic robotic entertainment.
Other interesting, and very amusing example conversations of these chatbots with each other:
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The morning after! Pinch yourself! You're welcome! Cleverbot! Clever them!
Happy couple Evie and George are apparently very welcome to each other...
until a slip of the tongue derails the conversation.
Try Cleverbot yourself at: http://www.cleverbot.com
George is, as you can see, a much older avatar technology to Evie,
which you can try at: http://www.existor.com
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Don't swear, creep! Bickering bots ... Clever them!
Two bots start out so talking so politely, but fall out thanks to a certain word.
Cleverbot AI powers the avatars - even their expressions, automatically.
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I did not say that! Clever them! Argumentative Cleverbot AI
Two bots Cleverbot bots quickly descend into argumentation.
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Are you American? Cleverer ... Cleverest ... Cleverbot AI ... Clever them!
Are you American? Are you British?
Much soul-searching on the part of the Cleverbot AI,
talking through two of Existor's avatars, results in some 'interesting' answers...
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Why are you sad? Clever them! Made with a dose of Cleverbot AI
Two Cleverbot AI characters from either side of the Atlantic talk about sadness ... or not.
Clever them! http://www.cleverbot.com
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Cleverbot AI with Evie Avatars - Life is a game - Clever them!
Two Cleverbot avatars called Evie fall out then come to a philosophical conclusion.
Clever them! Chat at www.cleverbot.com or see the avatar at www.existor.com.
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Objective of the Robocup organisation: "By mid-21st century robot soccer at the same level as human soccer players" !
23 juni 2012
Zie http://www.robocup.org/about-robocup/objective/
De internationale Robocup organisatie (http://www.robocup.org) heeft wel erg hooggespannen toekomst plannen als drroom:
"The Dream
We proposed that the ultimate goal of the RoboCup Initiative to be stated as follows:
By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup."
Gezien datgene wat er ten tijde van het schrijven dit artikel allemaal al mogelijk is op Robotvoetbal gebied,zou die drooom zomaar eens werkelijkheid kunnen gaan worden ! SciTechTalk houdt de vinger aan de pols (of moet ik zeggen "aan de robotarm ..... " ?).
Dit is de volledig tekst van de doelstellingen van Robocup:
http://www.robocup.org/about-robocup/objective/
"
Objective
Pushing the State-Of-The-Art
It is our intentions to use RoboCup as a vehicle to promote robotics and AI research, by offering publicly appealing, but formidable challenge. One of the effective ways to promote engineering research, apart from specific application developments, is to set a significant long term goal. When the accomplishment of such a goal has significant social impact, it is called the grand challenge project. Building a robot to play soccer game itself do not generate significant social and economic impact, but the accomplishment will certainly considered as a major achievement of the field. We call this kind of project as a landmark project. RoboCup is a landmark project as well as a standard problem.
The Dream
We proposed that the ultimate goal of the RoboCup Initiative to be stated as follows:
By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, comply with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup.
We propose that this goal to be the one of the grand challenges shared by robotics and AI community for next 50 years. This goal may sounds overly ambitious given the state of the art technology today. Nevertheless, we believe it is important that such a long range goal to be claimed and pursued. It took only 50 years from the Wright Brother’s first aircraft to Apollo mission to send man to the moon and safely return them to the earth. Also, it took only 50 years, from the invention of digital computer to the Deep Blue, which beat human world champion in chess. We recognize, however, that building humanoid soccer player requires equally long period and extensive efforts of broad range of researchers, and the goal will not be met in any near term.
The Landmark Project
The successful landmark project claims to accomplish a very attractive and broadly appealing goals. The most successful example is the Apollo space program. In case of the Apollo project, the U.S. committed the goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” (Urgent National Needs, John F. Kennedy,Speech to a Joint Session of Congress, 25 May 1961, Congressional Record — House (25 May 1961) p.8276.)
The accomplishment of the goal itself marks the history of the mankind. Although the direct economic impact of having someone landed on the moon is slim (To be fair, the Apollo mission was planned to gain the “National Prestige” and to demonstrate technical superiority over the former Soviet Union. Even in this, aspect, no direct military advantage was gained by having few astronauts on the moon.), technologies developed to achieve this goal was so significant that it formed the powerful technological and human foundations to the American industries. The important issue for the landmark project is to set the goal high enough so that a series of technical breakthrough is necessary to accomplish the task, and the goal need to be widely appealing and exciting. In addition, a set of technologies necessary to accomplish the goal must be the technologies which can form the foundation of the next generation industries.
In the Apollo project, the actual goal was much more than manned mission to the moon (PROJECT APOLLO: “THAT’S ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND.” The national effort that enabled Astronaut Neil Armstrong to speak those words as he stepped onto the lunar surface, fulfilled a dream as old as humanity. But Project Apollo’s goals went beyond landing Americans on the Moon and returning them safely to Earth: To establish the technology to meet other national interests in space; To achieve preeminence in space for the United States; To carry out a program of scientific exploration of the Moon; and To develop man’s capability to work in the lunar environment.)
In case of RoboCup, the ultimate goal is to “develop a robot soccer team which beats human world champion team.” (a more modest goal is “to develop a robot soccer team which play like a human players.”)
Needless to say, the accomplishment of the ultimate goal will take decades of efforts, if not centuries. It is not feasible, with the current technologies to accomplish this goal in any near term. However, this goal can easily create a series of well directed subgoals. Such an approach is common is any ambitious, or overly ambitious, project. In case of the American space program, the Mercury project and the Gemini project, which manned orbital mission, were two precursors to the Apollo mission. The first subgoal to be accomplished in RoboCup is “to build a real and software robot soccer teams which plays reasonably well with modified rules.” Even to accomplish this goal will undoubtfully generates technologies which impacts broad range of industries.
The Standard Problem
One other aspect of RoboCup is a view that RoboCup is a standard problem so that various theories, algorithms, and architectures can be evaluated. Computer chess is a typical example of the standard problem. Various search algorithms were evaluated and developed using this domain. With the recent accomplishment by the Deep Blue team, which beat Garry Kasparov, a human grand master, using the official rule, computer chess challenge is close to the finale. One of the major reasons for the success of computer chess as a standard problem is that the evaluation of the progress was clearly defined. The progress of the research can be evaluated as a strength of the system, which was indicated as the rating. However, as computer chess is about to complete its original goal, we need a new challenge. The challenge need to foster a set of technologies for the next generation industries. We consider that RoboCup fulfill such a demand.
Difference of domain characteristics between computer chess and RoboCup.
Comparison of Chess and RoboCup
The RoboCup is designed to meet the need of handling real world complexities, though in a limited world, while maintaining an affordable problems size and research cost. RoboCup offers an integrated research task covering the broad areas of AI and robotics. Such areas include: real-time sensor fusion, reactive behavior, strategy acquisition, learning, real-time planning, multi-agent systems, context recognition, vision, strategic decision-making, motor control, intelligent robot control, and many more.
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TECH UNITED : Voetbalrobots nu nog zelfstandiger - Automatische Scheidsrechter - Autonomous Referee (ROBOCUP) !
1 februari 2013
Zie http://www.techunited.nl/nl/nieuws/161
Om mee te mogen doen aan een RoboCup voetbaltoernooi moet je niet alleen snelle en slimme robots bouwen, je moet ook laten zien dat je daarmee de wetenschap vooruit brengt. Daarvoor schrijft ieder team jaarlijks een 'team description paper' waarin onder andere wetenschappelijke resultaten beschreven worden.
Ook is er op het wereldkampioenschap een 'scientific challenge' waarbij je als team een deel van dit onderzoek presenteert aan andere teams. Dit jaar hebben we een wel heel bijzonder doel voor deze challenge. We willen laten zien dat we, met behulp van een computer en extra camera boven het veld, een groot deel van de taken van de scheidsrechter over kunnen nemen!
Gerald Koudijs werkte tijdens zijn bachelor project aan deze automatische scheidsrechter, en werd daarbij begeleid door teamleden Ferry, Matthias en Gerrit. Afgelopen dinsdag presenteerde hij zijn werk. 'Het was een erg tof project', aldus Gerald, 'het was even aanpoten maar ondertussen herkent de auto referee goals, doeltrappen, corners en uitballen helemaal zelfstandig'. De bovenstaande video levert hiervoor het bewijs. Let vooral op het blokje links naast 'stop match', waarin volautomatisch de scheidsrechterlijke beslissing wordt weergegeven.
First trials of top-Cam based autoref for RoboCup middle-sized league:
TECH UNITED WERELDKAMPIOEN ROBOTVOETBAL (ROBOCUP) !
23 juni 2012
Zie http://www.techunited.nl/nl/nieuws/151
Eindelijk is het gelukt! EIN-DE-LIJK! In de vijfde finale op rij heeft Tech United zich beloond met de WERELDTITEL robotvoetbal in de Middle Size League!
In een spannende replay van de RoboCup Dutch Open finale werd tegen MRL uit Iran gewonnen met 4-1.
Het is niet voor te stellen hoe lang we naar dit moment uitgekeken hebben. Teamleden vallen elkaar in de armen en hier en daar zien we ogen vochtig worden. Alle avonduren, al het nachtwerk, het testen van TURTLEs in hotelkamers, vandaag betaalt het zich eindelijk uit!
Zoals gebruikelijk werd er vlak voor de wedstrijd nog veel veranderd aan de software. Het machteloze gevoel na het uploaden van de software, was deze keer sterker dan ooit. Beelden van de voorgaande vier finalewedstrijden flitsten door de hoofden van ieder teamlid. Het zou toch niet weer mis gaan in de laatste wedstrijd van het toernooi?
Tijdens de finale bleek opnieuw dat Tech United de nieuwe passingsregel, waarbij over de middellijn gespeeld moet worden, het beste beheerst. Zodoende werd er vlijmscherp gepast en ontstonden veel kansen. Daarnaast werd, geheel in Mexicaanse stijl, de Sombrero geïntroduceerd: een vlakke plaat bovenop de TURTLES die ervoor moet zorgen dat de veldspelers meer lobballen tegenhouden!
De teamleden werkend aan de AMIGO en de Humanoid robot waren minstens zo gespannen, waardoor een heuse finale-sfeer gecreëerd werd. Met een halve-finale plek voor de TUlip en een zevende plaats voor de @Homerobot mochten zij tevreden terugkijken op dit toernooi.
RoboCup - Robot Soccer Simulation - Robot Voetbal Simulatie
RoboCup2011 Instanbul Soccer Simulation 2D League Final Match
WrightEagle (University of Science and Technology of China, China)
vs.
HELIOS2011 (Fukuoka University, Osaka Prefecture University, AIST, Japan)
League Overview
Without the neccessity to maintain any robot hardware, the RoboCup Simulation League's focus comprises artificial intelligence and team strategy.
In the 2D Simulation League, two teams of eleven autonomous software programs (called agents) each play soccer in a two-dimensional virtual soccer stadium represented by a central server, called SoccerServer. This server knows everything about the game, i.e. the current position of all players and the ball, the physics and so on. The game further relies on the communication between the server and each agent. On the one hand each player receives relative and noisy input of his virtual sensors (visual, acustic and physical) and may on the other hand perform some basic commands (like dashing, turning or kicking) in order to influence its environment.
The big challenge in the Simulation League is to conclude from all possible world states (derived from the sensor input by calculating a sight on the world as absolute and noise-free as possible) to the best possible action to execute. As a game is divided into 6000 cycles this task has to be accomplished in time slot of 100 ms (the length of each cycle).