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January 27, 2005

My Buddy ASIMO

Today I took a break from evil computer projects and putting up with having a cold and went to see ASIMO, Honda's humanoid robot at a VIP presentation for mainly people in the College of Engineering. I actually ended up sitting one seat away from the senior VP of Honda America which was kind of cool, not that I got to talk to him or anything though. And OSU President Holbrook was there too somewhere in the back of the auditorium. I think that's about the closest I've ever seen her in person.
Anyways the presentation was pretty neat. Unfortunately I forgot to take my video or still camera with me this morning due to not sleeping well last night (colds suck) so I don't have any cool things to show. There was a demonstration of a few new things that I guess hadn't been demonstrated in realtime before also. One of them involved realtime face and speach recognition. ASIMO was able to recognize the faces of its users that it had previously memorized.
From getting to talk to the lead engineer after the presentation apparently the face recognition involves needing to be able to at least see both eyes of the person's face, so covering half your face with a hand may confuse it. There was also a demonstration of some combined visual and verbal commands which involved various hand motions coupled with verbal keywords. These involved moving to a point that was being pointed to by a person, following a person at a given distance, and stopping until a path had been cleared when it was obstructed. There was a realtime wireless video feed displayed on a projector which showed some of the algorithm output which was clearly doing some head recognition which it then narrowed down to a facial recognition block and at the same time a upper torso profile which included some analysis of arm location relative to the body center which was calculated by the estimate of the head location.
There was also at the beginning a somewhat more orchestrated presentation where I later found out was actually controlled by a person behind the curtain to a certain extent. From what I gathered the control was basically commands like "move to this point" or "complete this arm motion" and the rest of the task was computed in realtime on the robot itself. The stair climbing function requires the human to enter the number of steps to be climbed also. So there are a few things that it still requires help with, but in general the balancing and movement algorithms were pretty neat.
One thing I also noticed from being in the second row were that when each foot landed it actually looked like it wobbled around in a circular motion, I would assume to get a good feel for how the foot was settling on the surface before it actually planted its foot for balancing. Speaking with the engineer he didn't seem to think as much of it as I did saying it probably wasn't as pronounced as I thought it was since the rubber soles on the feet to have some play to them.
The realtime speach synthesis was (intentionally) childlike and I feel could use some more development in some cases. Some times the output sounded human-like and sometimes it seems a bit choppy.
Other things I found out: the whole system is mainly proprietary (or at least he wouldn't tell me otherwise) and distributed computing system. Communications are handed over a proprietary bus internally and I could only guess a 2.4Ghz link to a PC for external communications (there was also web browsing abilities - tell ASIMO to get the weather for you and it would read back the current forecast). Battery life is somewhere around 30 minutes on the 40V 10Ah NiMH pack. No, they wouldn't remove the cover to let me see the insides (is it inappropriate to ask a robot to strip off its outer panels?) and I didn't really get a definite answer as to if it was 3 Laws Safe, but I was told that would be kept in mind as ASIMO became more autonomous....

Posted by Plocmstart at January 27, 2005 10:02 PM

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