- Title: GERMANY: Researchers develop robot to mimic man
- Date: 3rd January 2011
- Summary: ACADEMIC EMPLOYEE LUKAS RYBOK ENTERING ROOM VARIOUS OF COMPUTER'S CAMERA HOOKED UP TO MULTI-PERSON TRACKING SYSTEM WOMAN GETTING UP AND WALKING TO COMPUTER WOMAN'S FACE ON COMPUTER SCREEN
- Embargoed: 18th January 2011 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Germany, Germany
- Country: Germany
- Topics: Quirky,Science / Technology
- Reuters ID: LVA9EBZRBVCR2Z61JO4DWYNLL8Z8
- Story Text: Researchers at KIT have inaugurated a new division devoted to 'anthropomatics' which spokesman, Ruediger Dillmann, says describes the interaction between humans and machines.
Amar III is its latest creation. Amar III is designed to use its body to learn how to think in much the same way as a human. Rather than rely on instructions being fed into a database, Amar III can learn recognise and interact with objects simply by touching them.
"On the one hand," Dillmann said, "we analyse the human's movements, the senses of the human being and we try to adapt it to the computer. On the other hand, we try to adapt the human's interactions with machines, so called humanoid robots."
Dillmann says he and his colleagues "carry out experiments in order to be able to in the future develop adaptations to everyday life."
For Amar III, one such environment has been an ordinary kitchen. The robot has learned to recognise such common objects as cups and plates of various colours and can respond to commands to interact with them. Amar III can set the table, and place dishes in a dishwasher. It can resolve the problem of an object in its way, simply by moving it to one side.
"The research focuses on the robot's ability to learn from the human being. The human carries out actions -- opening a fridge, loading or unloading the dishwasher -- which are saved in the computer, for the robot to try and repeat it to learn how to do it and how to interact with the human being," Dillmann said.
Part of the learning process the scientists want to incorporate into their robot is speech recognition. They want the robot to be able to interact with its environment auronomously and communicate like a human.
"Armar III" is also being taught how to interpret so called air writing whereby a person "writes" into the air with a special glove attached to a computer.
Tanja Schulz, one of the development team, said that with "speech recognition of silent speech the idea is to talk without disturbing others nearby."
Schulz said she and her colleagues were hopeful that one day, "we can give people their speech back who for example through an accident lost their vocal cords."
Armar III is the product of a four year pan-European project funded by the European Commission. The programme's goal is to develop robots which can operate in the real world. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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