Tag Archives: Hanson Robotics
#431168 Audrey Hepburn’s smiling humanoid ...
Meet Sophia, a humanoid robot that looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn and has sixty facial expressions, including to smile. She can also interact with humans, and her creator’s goal is to make machines smarter than humans, have the ability … Continue reading →
Posted in Human Robots
#431078 This Year’s Awesome Robot Stories From ...
Each week we scour the web for great articles and fascinating advances across our core topics, from AI to biotech and the brain. But robots have a special place in our hearts. This week, we took a look back at 2017 so far and unearthed a few favorite robots for your reading and viewing pleasure.
Tarzan the Swinging Robot Could Be the Future of FarmingMariella Moon | Engadget“Tarzan will be able to swing over crops using its 3D-printed claws and parallel guy-wires stretched over fields. It will then take measurements and pictures of each plant with its built-in camera while suspended…While it may take some time to achieve that goal, the researchers plan to start testing the robot soon.”
Grasping Robots Compete to Rule Amazon’s Warehouses Tom Simonite | Wired“Robots able to help with so-called picking tasks would boost Amazon’s efficiency—and make it much less reliant on human workers. It’s why the company has invited a motley crew of mechanical arms, grippers, suction cups—and their human handlers—to Nagoya, Japan, this week to show off their manipulation skills.”
Robots Learn to Speak Body LanguageAlyssa Pagano | IEEE Spectrum“One notable feature of the OpenPose system is that it can track not only a person’s head, torso, and limbs but also individual fingers. To do that, the researchers used CMU’s Panoptic Studio, a dome lined with 500 cameras, where they captured body poses at a variety of angles and then used those images to build a data set.”
I Watched Two Robots Chat Together on Stage at a Tech EventJon Russell | TechCrunch“The robots in question are Sophia and Han, and they belong to Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company that is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in humanoids. The duo took to the stage at Rise in Hong Kong with Hanson Robotics’ Chief Scientist Ben Goertzel directing the banter. The conversation, which was partially scripted, wasn’t as slick as the human-to-human panels at the show, but it was certainly a sight to behold for the packed audience.”
How This Japanese Robotics Master Is Building Better, More Human AndroidsHarry McCracken | Fast Company“On the tech side, making a robot look and behave like a person involves everything from electronics to the silicone Ishiguro’s team uses to simulate skin. ‘We have a technology to precisely control pneumatic actuators,’ he says, noting, as an example of what they need to re-create, that ‘the human shoulder has four degrees of freedom.’”
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Posted in Human Robots
#430686 This Week’s Awesome Stories From ...
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
DeepMind’s AI Is Teaching Itself Parkour, and the Results Are AdorableJames Vincent | The Verge“The research explores how reinforcement learning (or RL) can be used to teach a computer to navigate unfamiliar and complex environments. It’s the sort of fundamental AI research that we’re now testing in virtual worlds, but that will one day help program robots that can navigate the stairs in your house.”
VIRTUAL REALITY
Now You Can Broadcast Facebook Live Videos From Virtual RealityDaniel Terdiman | Fast Company“The idea is fairly simple. Spaces allows up to four people—each of whom must have an Oculus Rift VR headset—to hang out together in VR. Together, they can talk, chat, draw, create new objects, watch 360-degree videos, share photos, and much more. And now, they can live-broadcast everything they do in Spaces, much the same way that any Facebook user can produce live video of real life and share it with the world.”
ROBOTICS
I Watched Two Robots Chat Together on Stage at a Tech EventJon Russell | TechCrunch“The robots in question are Sophia and Han, and they belong to Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based company that is developing and deploying artificial intelligence in humanoids. The duo took to the stage at Rise in Hong Kong with Hanson Robotics’ Chief Scientist Ben Goertzel directing the banter. The conversation, which was partially scripted, wasn’t as slick as the human-to-human panels at the show, but it was certainly a sight to behold for the packed audience.”
BIOTECH
Scientists Used CRISPR to Put a GIF Inside a Living Organism’s DNAEmily Mullin | MIT Technology Review“They delivered the GIF into the living bacteria in the form of five frames: images of a galloping horse and rider, taken by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge…The researchers were then able to retrieve the data by sequencing the bacterial DNA. They reconstructed the movie with 90 percent accuracy by reading the pixel nucleotide code.”
DIGITAL MEDIA
AI Creates Fake ObamaCharles Q. Choi | IEEE Spectrum“In the new study, the neural net learned what mouth shapes were linked to various sounds. The researchers took audio clips and dubbed them over the original sound files of a video. They next took mouth shapes that matched the new audio clips and grafted and blended them onto the video. Essentially, the researchers synthesized videos where Obama lip-synched words he said up to decades beforehand.”
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Posted in Human Robots
#428993 Mimicking human facial expression ...
Hanson Robotics’ “Han” is a humanoid robot capable of recognizing someone in front of it, including their voice, and then mimicking that human’s facial expressions while interacting and talking. Wow!
Posted in Human Robots