Next-gen Robot Toys to Fetch Beer

FleaPlus writes "The Boston Globe reports that WowWee Toys, the creators of robots like the hack-friendly Robosapien series, has announced a collaboration with Evolution Robotics. WowWee's next generation of robots will make use of Evolution's tech for visual object recognition and indoor navigation, hopefully with future versions being able to not just entertain, but also 'perform useful tasks such as fetching a beer or even helping to carry the groceries.'"

Next-gen Robot AI Minds

[Anonymous Coward]

AI Minds For Robots [blogcharm.com] are being developed as Open Source Artificial Intelligence for installation in all manner of robots -- beer-fetching or otherwise.

Your Robo-Wife [virtualentity.com] will fetch beer for you any time of day or night.

Mind [sourceforge.net] is an artificial intelligence coded initially in JavaScript for Web migration and in Forth for robots, evolving towards full civil rights on a par with human beings and towards superintelligence beyond any human IQ.

Mind.html in JavaScript [blogcharm.com] has an installed user base of dozens of intelligent entities cached away on hard disks all over the world, with Update and News links for rapid prototyping of state-of-the-art robot AI.

AGI Radar [scn.org] is an advisory "radar screen" of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) projects advancing ineluctably towards a singularity and a cybernetic economy based on robots outfitted with artificial intelligence.

Technological Singularity [blogcharm.com] is now in a countdown to machine take-over world-wide, unless we humans co-operate with our superintelligent planet-mates in a Joint Stewardship of Earth.

Parent probably Arthur T. Murray

[FleaPlus]

FYI, the parent poster is probably Arthur T. Murray (i.e. Mentifex), a noted internet crank. He's been posting links to his "AI4U/Mind" junk on usenet since the 1980s, and has since expanded to the WWW. There's a FAQ all about him here:

http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html

How the technology works

[FleaPlus]

Hm... I originally included a couple of links which show how the technology works, but they were unfortunately removed from the submission. (Also, in retrospect I really should have made the title "Next-gen Robot Toys Smart Enough to Fetch Beer," as it probably would have increased the level of discussion a little more.) I'll go ahead and add them here...

The first bit of technology Evolution Robotics will probably be contributing is their ViPR [evolution.com] (Visual Pattern Recognition) tech, which allows for real-time recognition of objects in the environment. It's really quite impressive to see it in action -- it can learn how an object looks using just a single training example, has a high recognition rate, is resilient to occlusion/rotation/scale, and can operate at 15fps on an ordinary computer. It works by efficiently extracting a few hundred SIFT [wikipedia.org] (scale-invariant feature transform) features from an image, and then learns what affine arrangement of them indicate an object. A downloadable demo is available on the ViPR page.

Their SIFT-based ViPR techniques work -very- well on rigid objects, like labels, signs, furniture, cups, and pretty much any sort of static pattern. They tend to work less well on deformable objects, like faces and people.

The other piece of technology is NorthStar, [evolution.com] used for indoor navigation. This uses a projector to shine some IR light spots on the ceiling. An IR-sensitive camera on the robot can see where the light spots are, allowing it to easily determine its location relative to the projector, so it can basically create a map of its environment using projector-relative coordinates.