randform

The main topic of the last issue of the magazine of the Deutsche Hochschulverband was “trust” or “confidence” (in german “Vertrauen”) Various authors were discussing multiple manifestations of trust. The lesson was inspiring and made me think about it the issue and in particular the role of trust in connection to robots. My sister said that this blog post sounds like the thought of the day. So you have been warned if you read further.

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Toyota revealed a roboter violonist yesterday. I wonder wether he is able to do position shifts, though …
via pink tentacle

If we move around in space-time we can obtain much more information about the surrounding space-time than by just watching it. For example swimming is very different in a curved than in a noncurved space (-> here a website where observations are made how swimmers move around in various environments).

However linking sensoric information with motoric information, like in computer science applications is a very difficult task. The library on the website of David Philipona of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception has a good collection of links, like for example to the Max-Planck-Institut for Biological cybernetics with its famous virtual treadmill project cyberwalk.

The group at the Laboratoire did some works in order to find a mathematical formulation of how to gain information about the surrounding space via sensoric/motoric information, like e.g. in their paper
Perception of the structure of the physical world using unknown multimodal sensors and effectors

This post is a follow up post to some posts (1,2,3) relating to the question of simulation. It is concerned with the question of how “real” a simulation can “feel”.
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Just an update of an old randform post about funny flying objects. This time you have the choice to read about big or small FO’s.

I just found this link about the upcoming meeting on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, which will soon take place in Boston.

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Engineers at Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability in Darmstadt, Germany apparently have found a way to cancel out environmental noise using the very windows that normally amplify it.

via pruned

Just two links to humanoid robot videos as an update (randform posts e.g. here or here).

One video is displaying a quite good jumping humanoid robot, the other video is displaying the already rather wellknown Jules of hansonrobotics.com…..Looking at Jules reminds again at the question about faces as interfaces and the uncanny valley, as e.g. discussed in this randform post.

Berlin this morning in a wireless spot.

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->A funny script for the Wii remote called Wiitar by Jordan Sanborn available at WiiLi.org (see also this old randform post)

->another sportive Wii remote application: Tennis with a Wiibot

if you dont have a wiimote but just a brain then this artistic communication with an industrial robot may be interesting:
->empathizer by robotlab