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Simulation, Consciousness, Existence -- Hans Moravec, 1998
A simulated world hosting a simulated person can be a closed self-contained entity. It might exist as a program on a computer processing data quietly in some dark corner, giving no external hint of the joys and pains, successes and frustrations of the person inside. Inside the simulation events unfold according to the strict logic of the program, which defines the ``laws of physics'' of the simulation. The inhabitant might, by patient experimentation and inference, deduce some representation of the simulation laws, but not the nature or even existence of the simulating computer. The simulation's internal relationships would be the same if the program were running correctly on any of an endless variety of possible computers, slowly, quickly, intermittently, or even backwards and forwards in time, with the data stored as charges on chips, marks on a tape, or pulses in a delay line, with the simulation's numbers represented in binary, decimal, or Roman numerals, compactly or spread widely across the machine. There is no limit, in principle, on how indirect the relationship between simulation and simulated can be.
RobotVision@ICPR | ImageCLEF - Image Retrieval in CLEF
The RobotVision task has been proposed to the ImageCLEF participants for the first time in 2009. The task attracted considerable attention, with 19 inscribed research groups, 7 groups eventually participating and a total of 27 submitted runs. The second edition of the RobotVision task will be part of the ImageCLEF@ICPR contest introducing new interesting challenges to the pattern recognition community.
The second edition of the RobotVision task addresses the problem of visual place classification. Specifically, participants will be asked to classify rooms and areas on the basis of image sequences, captured by a stereo camera mounted on a mobile robot within an office environment, under varying illumination conditions. The system built by the participants should be able to answer the question "where are you?" when presented with a test sequence imaging rooms seen during training (from different viewpoints and under different conditions) or additional rooms that were not imaged in the training sequence.
RobotCafe.com : Software : Simulators
Links to a bunch of robotics simulation environments
Literature Survey on Affordances
At the bottom there is a nice outline of important papers.
To afford or not to afford: A new formalization of affordance towards affordance-based robot control
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.”“... an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points bothways, to the environment and to the observer.”“The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object.”“The theory of affordances rescues us from the philosophical muddle of assumingfixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name...You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.”
Tekkotsu: Cognitive Robotics
NOTE: their definition of cognitive robotics is a little off
... extending Tekkotsu to support higher level abstractions for robot programming. We call our approach "cognitive robotics" because it draws inspiration from ideas in cognitive science, such as Ullman's notion of "visual routines", Paivio's "dual coding theory", and Gibson's concept of "affordances". Cognitive robotics makes no strong theoretical claims, but instead focuses on developing technology that actually works, on real robots, with their inherent physical constraints and sensory limitations.
Tekkotsu: open source robotics software
Tekkotsu is an open source framework supporting software development for a variety of robotic platforms.
ODE - Wiki for RobotCub and Friends
Some Linux details about the iCub simulator.
[Imageworld] CFP: 3rd Semantic Robot Vision Challenge 2009
The Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (SRVC) is a research competition
that is designed to advance the state of the art in embodied vision,
active scene understanding, and automatic acquisition of knowledge
from the Internet. This competition is an indoor robotic photo
scavenger hunt. Teams will be required to demonstrate a robot that has
the ability to:
1. Read and parse a textual list of generic or specific objects to be
found in the environment. Examples from 2008 include “frying pan”,
“upright vacuum cleaner” and “Ritz Crackers”.
2. Autonomously connect to the Internet and build an object
classification database from images or other information related to
the listed objects, in a set amount of time.
3. Autonomously navigate and search the unknown environment with the
task of taking snapshots of the listed objects using the data acquired
from the Internet.
4. Return an image of each object type containing a single bounding
box around the pictured object.
CURE - SLAM system
The CURE software package provides implementations of many of the algorithms used at the lower levels of the navigation system in the Explorer scenario in CoSy. It provides the means for feature based SLAM and localization, obstacle avoidance, autonomous exploration, detecting and tracking people using laser data, etc.
(PDF) Fourier Fiducial Tags - Circular markers
In this paper we introduce the Fourier tag, a synthetic
fiducial marker used to visually encode information and
provide controllable positioning. The Fourier tag is a synthetic
target akin to a bar-code that specifies multi-bit information
which can be efficiently and robustly detected in an
image.
Flyphone: Visual Self-Localisation Using a Mobile Phone as Onboard Image Processor on a Quadrocopter (restricted access / Springerlink)
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) needs to orient itself in its operating environment to fly autonomously. Localisation methods based on visual data are independent of erroneous GPS measurements or imprecise inertial sensors. In our approach, a quadrocopter first establishes an image database of the environment. Afterwards, the quadrocopter is able to locate itself by comparing a current image taken of the environment with earlier images in the database. Therefore, characteristic image features are extracted which can be compared efficiently. We analyse three feature extraction methods and five feature similarity measures. The evaluation is based on two datasets recorded under real conditions. The computations are performed on a Nokia N95 mobile phone, which is mounted on the quadrocopter. This lightweight, yet powerful device offers an integrated camera and serves as central processing unit. The mobile phone proved to be a good choice for visual localisation on a quadrocopter.
High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation | Hizook
A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!
3. Bio-inspired Flying Robots (EPFL Video for AAAI 08 contest)
They show fly-inspired robots using linear cameras that go around based on optical flow.
"In this video we present bio-inspiration as the main drive for the design of platforms, autonomous navigation strategies and aerial swarming for flying robots."
Semantic Robot Vision Challenge (december 2009)
Will take place as part of the international symposium of visual computing
RobotCub - An Open Framework for Research in Embodied Cognition
Somewhere in the "software" sections there's an active vision system that mimics primate vision.
Decisions in Motion
The research goals of the project "DECISIONS-IN-MOTION" is to describe the neural mechanisms used to guide behaviour in complex visual scenes, in which the living (or animated) agent is in motion and navigates to avoid stationary and/or moving objects. During reporting period P1 we have explored motion-based image segmentation in the visual cortex, and we have begun to derive neural models that explicitly make use of a hierarchy of sensory areas (low-, mid-, high-level visual areas) to extract meaningful information about the location and motion of objects in the environment. One objective of the project is to use the outputs of these units for sensory-based decision-making. This process will weight these inputs and relations between these inputs based on utility functions. The resulting cognitive architecture will be tested in an autonomous robot navigating in complex visual environments to determine the efficiency of the image motion segmentation and goal-directed adaptive behaviour.
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