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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.'"
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 (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 (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, 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.