YEAR 2004. ECE 478/578/678 Intelligent Robotics I. MOBILE ROBOTS.

Professor: Marek A. Perkowski,
Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Intelligent Robotics Laboratory




The Intelligent Robotics Laboratory is located in Suite 70, Fourth Avenue Building (FAB).
The Industrial Robotics Laboratory is located in Room 30, Portland Center for Advanced Technology.



About Robot Theatre
  1. Project. NEW!
  2. Material covered in lectures in 2004..

  3. Topics for midterm.

    RESEARCH GROUPS

    1. HEXOR GROUP
      1. Christopher Brawn
      2. Natalie Metzger
      3. Bruce Yen
      4. Rajiv Sudunagunta
    2. PROFESSOR PERKY GROUP.
      1. Stefan Gebauer
      2. Myron Machado
      3. Normen Giesecke
      4. Jeff Morris
    3. EMOTIONAL MAN GROUP.
      1. Sian Rees
      2. Randy Borck
      3. Ray Schmelzer
      4. Jeff Allen
    4. EMOTIONAL WOMAN GROUP.
      1. Chris Motch
      2. Alfred, Ping Hung Cheung
      3. Yu Xia
    5. EVOLVABLE ROBOTS AND QUANTUM ROBOTS.
      1. Dilip Patil
      2. Kavitha Ramasamy
      3. Nagaraj Kanalagakshmi?
      4. Akarsh Hebbar
      5. one more lady.

      HOMEWORK FOUR


      Students shoule be ready for Friday, first week of March. Most of talks will be, however, the second week of March.
      Please send me outlines of your presentations ahead of your date, so I can put them to the WWW Page. Look to Natalie below for example.

    6. HEXOR GROUP - presentations first week of March.
      1. Christopher Brawn - beacon-based vision for a robot in labyrinth. (assigned earlier).
        Your task is to present the concepts and mathematics to localize and orientate a mobile robot in a labirynth based on beacons. Concentrate on algorithms.
      2. Natalie Metzger - emotional speech in robot dialogs. (assigned earlier).
          Your task is to learn about generation of emotional speech/dialog patterns with lips synchronization. Discuss two top research groups. What software is available for free? What are the main research issues to be solved? Create an excellent PPT presentation and write a report. Put them both to your WWW Page and give to me on paper.
        1. Expressive Speech.
        2. Shikano Lab.
        3. Janet Cahn’s Emotional & Expressive Synthesized Speech (Affect Editor Program).
        4. Evolution Robotics – ERSP Interaction.
        5. Sony Computer Science Lab – The production and recognition of emotions in speech.
          Outline:
          I. Intro
          A. Brief discussion of topics in respect to emotional speech/dialog patterns and lip synchronization
          II. Research Topic 1 - Kismet
          A. Overview
          1. Emotion in Human Speech
          2. Expressive Synthesized Speech
          3. Generation of Utterances
          4. Real-time Lip Synchronization
          B. Main research issues to be solved/improved upon
          1. Expressiveness and richness of the robot's vocal modality
          2. Prosodic effects of grammatical structure
          3. Building a system that humans can interact with and train in a natural, instinctive manner
          III. Research Topic 2 - ASKA
          A. Overview
          B. Main research issues to be solved
          IV. Free Software
          A. DECtalk Demo
          B. Affect Editor (based on DECtalk)
          V. Conclusion


      3. Bruce Yen - beacon-based vision for a robot in labyrinth. (assigned earlier).
        Your task is to present robot vision software to localize and orientate a mobile robot in a labirynth based on beacons. Concentrate on software concepts and programs. Also vision algorithms in contrast to math algorithms to be presented by Christopher Brawn.
      4. Rajiv Sudunagunta - Probabilistic Methods in Mobile Robotics. See my ECE 479 Web page. Read section "Probabilistic robots" in PDF and next additional materials located on this 479 Web page below the "Probabilistic Robots" slides. Your task is to present the main ideas of probabilistic robotics, especially to map building for mobile robots. This is a 45 minutes presentation, not 30 minutes.

    7. PROFESSOR PERKY GROUP. - presentations first week of March.
      1. Stefan Gebauer - speech of Kismet - from Cynthia Breazeal book. (assigned earlier). Your task is to present all aspects of speech analysis, speech synthesis, dialog and emotions according to Guru Cynthia Breazeal. What can be improved on her approach? Talk to Natalie first to avoid overlap.

      2. Myron Machado - vision of Kismet - from Cynthia Breazeal book. (assigned earlier). Your task is to present all aspects of robot vision for Kismet. What can be improved on this approach?

      3. Normen Giesecke - architecture of Kismet - from Cynthia Breazeal book. (assigned earlier). Your task is to present the robot architecture (top level, philosophy and organization) of Kismet. What can be improved on this approach? How it differs from Professor Perky architecture?

      4. Jeff Morris - any chapter of your choice from Cynthia Breazeal book, but other than the above three students. (assigned now). Talk to Stefan for the book. You can present one of first chapters.



    8. EMOTIONAL MAN GROUP. Presentation first week of March.
      1. Sian Rees - Person recognition technologies, especially face recognition. From my ECE 479 webpage. Your choice. (assigned earlier).
      2. Randy Borck - Polymer Technology for robot faces and other robotic applications.
        Your task is to present the Electro-Active Polymer Actuators and especially their use in robotics. How can we use them for robot faces in this project. We are going to purchase the kit described in point 2 below.
        1. Electro Active Polymers in Robotics. More reading.
        2. "Contractile Polymeric Artificial Muscles Science Kit".
        3. A. Wingert et al., paper "Hyper-Redundant Robot Manipulators Actuated by Optimized Binary Dialectric Polymers."
        4. Artificial Muscle Presentation. In PPT format.
        5. DielectricElastomers.ppt
        6. Future sensors.

      3. Jeff Allen - Robot System Architectures for emotional robots.
        1. Press release from CMU.
        2. Project page (CS institute). This is the project page (pictures, videos).
        3. Video.
        4. The social robot project (theatre group).
        5. Inkah (british Kings College) (look especially to the section tech)
        6. Humanoid SIG (Japan, Kyoto). Scientific publications, pictures, movies.


      4. Ray Schmelzer - no homework 4 has been assigned.

  4. EMOTIONAL WOMAN GROUP. Presentation first week of March.

  5. Chris Motch - Present those ideas of new (2004!) MIT projects that you find most interesting, innovative and at the same time applicable to our theatre project.

        NEW RESEARCH PROJECTS FROM MIT
      1. Artur Arsenio. Flexible, Portable Robotic Brains/Heads.
      2. Jessica Banks. Design and Control of an Anthropomorphic Robotic Finger with Multi-Point Tactile Sensation.
      3. Aaron Edsinger. A Gestural Language for a Humanoid Robot.
      4. Paul Fitzpatrick. Role Transfer for Robot Tasking.
      5. Matthew Marjanovic. Learning Ego-motion Relations via Sensorimotor Correlation.
      6. Matthew Marjanovic. MESO: Simulated Muscles for a Humanoid Robot.
      7. Giorgio Metta: Development of Imitation in a Humanoid Robot.
      8. Paulina Varchavskaia and Paul Fitzpatrick. Characterizing and Processing Robot-Directed Speech.
      9. Paulina Varchavskaia. Early Pragmatic Language Development for an Infant Robot.
      10. Juan D. Velasquez. Computational Approaches to Affective Processing. Juan D. Velasquez.


    1. Alfred Ping Hung Cheung - Interactive sociable robots from MIT. Presentation is second week of March, perhaps on Friday.
      Below I selected some interesting papers about humanoid robots. Most of them from MIT. Your task is to find and present those main ideas of sociable interactive robots that are applicable to robot theatre as we are building.

        RESEARCH OF BROOKS, BREAZEAL AND SCASELLATTI AT MIT. OTHER WORK ON HUMANOID ROBOTS.

      1. Ph. D. Thesis of Brian Scassellati. Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot.
      2. Pollard et al, Adapting Human Motion for the Control of a Humanoid Robot.
      3. Okuno et al, Social Interaction of Humanoid Robot based on Audio-Visual Tracking.
      4. Robins et al. Effects of repeated exposure of a humanoid robot on children with autism - Can we encourage basic social interaction skills?
      5. Rodney Brooks et al. The COG Project: Building a Humanoid Robot.
      6. Bishof and Graefe. Dependable Multimodal Communication and Interaction with Robotic Assistants. Project from Germany.
      7. Kanda et al. A Constructive approach for developing interactive humanoid robots. Very useful paper.
      8. Di Salvo et al. All Robots are not Created Equal: The Design and Perception of Humanoid Robot Heads. Easy.
      9. C. Breazeal. Function meets Style: Insights from Emotion Theory Applied to HRI. HRI means Human-Robot-Interface.
      10. C. Breazeal. Emotion and Sociable Humanoid Robots.
      11. G. Hoffman and C. Breazeal. Robots that work in Collaboration with People.
      12. Breazeal et al. Interactive Robot Theatre.
      13. Bentivegna et al. Humanoid Robot Learning and Game Playing Using PC-Based Vision.
      14. C. Breazeal. Emotive qualities in lip-synchronized robot speech.
      15. E. Drumwright and M. Mataric. Generating and Recognizing Free-space Movements in Humanoid Robots.
      16. B. Adams et al. Humanoid Robots. A New Kind of Tool. Very good and easy paper.
      17. S. Calinon and A. Billard. PDA Interface for Humanoid Robots.
      18. C. Breazeal. Regulation and Entrainment in Human-Robot Interaction.
      19. J. Peters et al. Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Robots.
      20. Okada et al. Humanoid Robot Mechanisms for Responsive Mobility.
      21. C. Breazeal and R. Brooks. Robot Emotion: A Functional Perspective.
      22. Bishof and Graefe. Demonstrating the Humanoid Robot Hermes at an Exhibition: A Long-Term Dependability Test.
      23. C. Breazeal et al. Humanoid Robots as Cooperative Partners for People.
      24. C. Breazeal et al. Interactive Robot Theatre.
      25. C.Breazeal and B. Scassellati. Robots that Imitate Humans.
      26. Kuffner et al. Self-collision Detection and Prevention for Humanoid Robots.
      27. C. Breazeal. Towards Sociable Robots.
      28. C. Breazeal et al. Learning from and About Others: Towards Using Imitation to Bootstrap the Social Understanding of Others by Robots.
      29. C. Breazeal. Social Interactions in HRI: The Robot View.
      30. B. Scassellati. Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot.
      31. Vijayakumar et al. Overt Visual Attention for a Humanoid Robot.
      32. Kanda et al. Development and Evaluation of an Interactive Humanoid Robot "ROBOVIE".
      33. P. Lam and J. Baltes. "Tao-Pie-Pie: Humanoid Robot.
      34. A. Alberts. Conceptual Design of Humanoid Robots.


    2. Yu Xia - Decision Trees in Robotics. Presentation is second week of March. Perhaps on Friday.
      Your task is to present applications of decision trees in robotics. I give here also slides about theory of decision trees to help you, but this material will be covered in class, so do not cover it and concentrate only on problem formulations and applications in robotics that use decision trees. Do not go into details. Present from the point of view of the user.
      1. L. Pyeatt and A. Howe, Decision Tree Function Approximation in Reinforcement Learning. Application of decision trees in robotics. Good. Research paper in PDF.
      2. E. Swere and D. Mulvaney. Robot Navigation Using Decision Trees. Good and useful paper.

      3. Decision Tree Learning. Concept and theory of Decision Trees. Good review of decision trees. We will cover this later on.
      4. Part7.3. Decision Trees.
      5. Error in decision trees.
      6. Machine Learning in Computer Vision.
      7. Decision trees applied to a robot agent and implemented in Prolog. To be covered in the class next quarter. Just for your information.
      8. The concept of Decision forests.