external

Here is a chance to work at Södertörn University in close collaboration with FAL and the Mobile Life Centre! Lars Erik Holmquist is also a professor in Media Technology and will hire a Ph.D. student to work on Mobile Media - follow this link to read the full announcement. The relevant position to apply for is Position 2 in the announcement!

This week several FAL members are attending Human-Robot Interaction 2010 in Osaka. Henriette was co-organizer of the HRI Pioneers Workshop for new researchers in the field, and also presented a poster on attitudes towards robots. Ylva presented a paper in the Collaborations with the Arts Workshop, together with artist Ulla West. Also at this workshop, Lars Erik organized a brainstorm session. Finally, Rob Tieben's video on ActDresses was featured in the video program.
One highlight was the presentations by Japanese companies on the latest robot technology, including Sanrio subsidiary Kokoro, which manufactures many well-known robots, including the Geminoid (together with Osaka University and ATR) and HRP-4c (together with AIST). Can the lifelike Hello Kitty robot be far off? Another highlight was the keynote speech by Kazuhiro Kosuge on the Dance Partner Robot, in which he compared human-robot interaction to a dance with a robot follower reading the human lead. Also, the panel on Social Responsibility in Human-Robot Interaction with Hiroshi Ishiguro, Illah Nourbakhsh, Peter Kahn and Vanessa Evers raised a lot of interesting questions on how robots are presented to the general public and the future we claim to be building as robot researchers.
Below are some pictures of the robots present at the conference reception. The picture above shows the human-robot play we got to see in a traditional Japanese theatre.

Robotic surgical technology with its three-dimensional, high-definition view gives surgeons the sensation of touch, even as they operate from a remote console. A new study describes the phenomenon, called intersensory integration, and reports that surgical outcomes for prostate cancer surgery using minimally invasive robotic technology compare favorably with traditional invasive surgery.

In the following video Mattias Rost is presenting and demoing a mobile application called Portrait Catalog. Portrait Catalog is an application for sharing and collecting portrait photos of friends. The portraits are sent over Bluetooth from one person to the other, but portraits cannot be forwarded once received. The application is inspired by the act of sharing portrait photos in elementary school, where youngsters eagerly exchange their portrait picture with their friends when the photos arrive. The application was developed during an internship at Sony Ericsson in the early summer of 2008.

Push!Music is a mobile music sharing application that uses ad-hoc wireless networking to allow co-located people to share music between each other. This can be done in two ways. First, songs can autonomously copy and send themselves to another player based on similar music listening histories. Second, users can personally recommend songs to others simply by sending them. The Push!Music project was part of the European Union project ECAgents, and has been covered in e.g. a demonstration at UbiComp 2005, and a paper at ECSCW 2007.

Watch the video below where Maria Håkansson and Mattias Rost demonstrates Push!Music!

Here's a video of GlowBots!

GlowBots are small round robots that displays visually appealing shapes on a color-intense hypnotizing display. Interacting with the robot encourages it to seek out and communicate its shape to other robots. Through their rich interaction a flora of shapes emerges that entices interest and engagement in an open ended fashion for joy and entertainment.



GlowBots are here presented by Mattias Jacobsson.

This week we post a video of an old project called Context Photography, here presented by Maria Håkansson.

Here's a description of the concept. Watch the video for a demo of the mobile application!

When taking a picture, would it be possible and interesting to capture something in addition to the visuals of the scenery? We explore if e.g. sound, temperature and pollution could be used as parameters in a digital camera and how these phenomena could be "visualised" or "represented" in a picture. The fundamental idea is to go beyond the traditional parameters (light, speed and focus) used in both analogue and digital cameras, and widen the concept of what a camera can capture. Digital technology opens up for new dimensions that can affect photography! This means that digital cameras no longer have to resemble their analogue counterparts. Unlike the editing of a picture in e.g. Photoshop, we want the (new) parameters to affect the image in real-time.

We have collaborated with a focus group of open-minded and explorative Lomographers, as well as with other dedicated amateur photographers. They were not primarily our end user group, but a source of inspiration (and also participants in design sessions) when designing the camera prototype.

This week we post a video on a mobile application for exploring the world through geo tagged photos. By having to physically move around the physical surroundings to unlock photos geotagged at locations visited, the aim is to bring back a sense of exploring when browsing through geotagged photos.

The application is here presented by Mattias Rost.

Today we had the pleasure of meeting with Ann-Louise Norén from the company Bestic. The company is in the process of introducing their product - a robotic arm assistance tool for eating, to the market. Our initial discussions focused on how we could study the end user perspectives on such technology and in particular look at longer terms of interaction and social aspects. We are very much looking forward to dig deeper into actual practice and use of robotic materials!

Playful Experiences is a new project in the Mobile Life Centre. The main purpose of the project is to understand what constitutes enjoyment of using a product; what kinds of experiences the product can elicit, and how to design something that evokes certain kind of experience. The kick-off workshop of the project took place in a beautiful cosy house in Bergianska trädgården, Naturens Hus. Together with 3 researchers from Nokia Research Center in Tampere and a group from the Mobile Life Centre (Ylva, Henriette and Nicolas) discussed and decided what we want to achieve in this project. From the playful experience of flirting to language differences around the word "playfulness", the discussions were intense and promising for the next steps of the projects. You can read more on the project on the Mobile Life website.

Lars Erik Holmquist chairs the Emerging Technologies section of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, in Yokohama, Japan. In Emerging Technologies, attendees experience works that show how computer graphics and interactive techniques are evolving to adapt to new technical, social, and environmental conditions. We collaborated with Södertörn University to produce a teaser video for the exhibition:

After being on parental leave during 2009, I'm now looking forward to face new interesting research challenges! I'm very happy to soon start developing forecasts about future scenarios of technology use, in a collaboration project between Wireless@KTH, Mobile Life and several industry partners. I'll also continue my work in the LIREC project about everyday robotics and ethics. Furthermore, I'm hoping to soon contribute with new funding and interesting projects at the Mobile Life Centre!

Cheers,

Sara Ljungblad

Engineers and scientists from NASA and GM are working together to build a new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future robots could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.

Ylva and Sara are going to London 8-10 of February to attend a LIREC meeting. Their ambition with the meeting is to discuss how to work with scenarios as a design-tool in robot research, and to go from this towards design requirements.

Even simple insects can generate quite different movement patterns with their six legs. The animal uses various gaits depending on whether it crawls uphill or downhill, slowly or fast. Scientists have now developed a walking robot, which can flexibly and autonomously switch between different gaits. The success of their solution lies in its simplicity: a small and simple network with just a few connections can create very diverse movement patterns. To this end, the robot uses a mechanism for "chaos control."

A particle filter is a technique used in computer vision to estimate the state of a system, given noisy data from fallible sensors. The underlying idea is called a hidden markov model, and looks something like this:

The assumption is that any state of the system is dependant on it’s previous state (and thus all previous states) and this state is something we can never know directly, only via observations. There are two very different sources of inaccuracy or noise. One originates in the state change process – as it’s assumed we can never have a complete model of this (a good bet in the case of human actions for example). The other source of noise is in the observation process itself, which comes from the way the sensors work. This is more predictable, and filters of this type are built to allow you to account for this.

Particle filters maintain a multitude of hypotheses of the hidden state of the system at the same time. They attempt to model state changes in some basic way, for instance the velocity of a moving object. They also model the observation process, for example a distance/angle reading of an object in x,y space. Each time a new observation arrives, the system grades each particle’s simulated observation against the incoming one and weights them accordingly.

This is a frame from some particle filter code I’ve written which is tracking an object as described above. The line is pointing to the current estimation which is based on readings from a radar like sensor. I’ve told the system that the heading sensor is less reliable than the distance sensor, and so the particles are spread out in a vague crescent shape accordingly. This shape is called the probability distribution function (or pdf) and it’s a strength of particle systems to model complex pdfs such as this effectively.

The sight of a cockroach scurrying for cover may be nauseating, but the insect is also a biological and engineering marvel, and is providing researchers with what they call "bioinspiration" in a quest to build the world's first legged robot that is capable of running effortlessly over rough terrain.

Maria Håkansson has received a personal grant from Nokia Research Center Helsinki to do a user study of location-based services from a non-urban perspective! The project is planned for January-March 2010.

Maria Håkansson has been interviewed in New Scientist about our long-term study of the robotic toy dinosaur Pleo in the homes of families. Read the article here!

If you've been waiting for the day to arrive when computers actually start performing surgery, that moment might soon be upon us. Scientists have developed a computerized 3-D model that allows surgeons to use robotics to operate on a beating heart.