Monday, July 21, 2008

Is there a Robot in Your Future?

Here's a video on the Felix project in Europe to create "feeling" robots:



The EU is big on "big science". They have had a series of "frameworks" in which they fund large collaborations with targeted goals. It isn't clear to me that this has been particularly successful. But my bottom line is that money moves mountains, so I'm a big fan even if the explicit funding goal isn't met. (I have the same complaint about grant-oriented funding in North America.)

The three-year, Sixth Framework Programme project involves six countries and 25 specialists who are building demonstration robots as proof of concept for advances in building social, emotional robots. From a report in PhysOrg.com:
Robots that can adapt to people's behaviours are needed if machines are to play a part in society, such as helping the sick, the elderly, people with autism or house-bound people, working as domestic helpers, or just for entertainment, according to Canamero.

The work is still well shy of an I Robot scenario with emotionally complex machines taking matters into their own hands, but the empathy empowering software being developed by Feelix Growing is a big step forward for robotics.

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