EU Project – Robohub

EURATHLON outdoor robotics competition

Wolfgang Heller — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 15:41:00 +0000

EURATHLON is a new outdoor robotics competition, which will invite teams to test the intelligence and autonomy of their robots in realistic mock emergency-response scenarios. Inspired by the 2011 Fukushima accident, the EURATHLON competition will require a team of land, underwater and flying robots to work together to survey the scene, collect environmental data, and identify critical hazards. Linked public engagement activities will connect EURATHLON with robotics research, industry and emergency services, as well as the general public. By targeting a specific and urgent need, EURATHLON will provide European robotics with a platform for challenging, extending and showcasing European cognitive robotics technologies.

In 2013 the competition will focus on land based vehicles, in 2014 the competition addresses sea-based vehicles, and in 2015 it will be held as a joint land, sea and air event.

euRathlon 2013 will be held from 23-27 September in Berchtesgaden, Germany and is based on the previously successful ELROB competition. Deadline for the competition application is 1st March 2013!

EU-project: Walking like humans

Wolfgang Heller — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:32:00 +0000

A consortium coordinated by by the Spanish Council for Scientific Research, CSIC, will develop and demonstrate human-like gait and posture in a controlled compliant biped robot as a result of a combination of the most relevant motor control and cognitive mechanisms found in humans.
The three-year project called H2R “Integrative approach for the emergence of human-like robotic locomotion”, starting on Feb 1, 2013, is co-funded by the EU FP7. A central goal of the project is to formalize a benchmarking scheme that can be used worldwide by the scientific community to assess and compare human-like skills of robotic humanoids.

The H2R consortium wants to involve the international community in this process, so that the benchmarking scheme can reach a global consensus and be universally adopted.

For more information about the project, please visit the H2R website.

======================================= G L O B A L R O B O T I C S B R A I N ======================================= http://robotland.blogspot.com

European robotics law

Wolfgang Heller — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 10:00:00 +0000

At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, “bladerunner” Oscar Pistorius became the first double leg amputee to participate in the Olympics when he entered the men’s 400 metres race and was part of South Africa’s 4 × 400 metres relay team.
Experts in bionics, robotics and AI work intensively together to find new and better solutions to eliminate most of human disabilities in the coming decades. With the introduction of technical innovations such as bionic legs, bionic eyes and neural prostheses common ideas about disability, identity and human rights are challenged.

The European RoboLaw project funded to the tune of €1.9m ($2.3m), of which €1.4m comes from the European Commission, is an effort to anticipate critical social and ethical issues and work out where and how legal frameworks might need to be changed as the technology of bionics and neural interfaces improves. The project consortium brings together experts from engineering, law, regulation, philosophy and human enhancement. The most important outcome of the research will consist of a “White Book on Regulating Robotics“, which will containing regulatory guidelines for the European Commission, in order to establish a solid framework of ‘robolaw’ in Europe.

Making an iCub robot “clever”

Mike Hamer — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:22:18 +0000

As part of the IM-CLeVeR project, the IDSIA robotics laboratory recently released a video-overview of their work on the technologies, architectures and algorithms required to give an iCub robot more human-like abilities. This includes the ability to reason about and manipulate its local environment, and in the process, to acquire new skills that can be applied to future problems.

The iCub robot is an open-source humanoid platform developed by the Italian Institute of Technology and used by over 20 robotics laboratories worldwide in research areas such as human-robot interaction, computer reasoning, motion planning and “socially aware robotics”.

Some of these we’ve covered on Robohub before: From iCub to artist and iCub drums and crawls using bio-inspired control.

The IM-CLeVeR project was launched in 2009 and uses the iCub as a platform to support the goal of:

Developing a new methodology for designing robots that can cumulatively learn new skills through autonomous development based on intrinsic motivations, and reuse such skills for accomplishing multiple, complex, and externally-assigned tasks.

In the following 13 minute video, researchers from the IDSIA laboratory, an IM-CLeVeR project-partner, describe motivations, challenges and successes in fields such as computer vision, motion planning, “reflex” behaviors and reinforcement learning.

For more information on the project, consult the laboratory’s other videos and technical releases, or visit the IM-CLeVeR homepage.

A list of iCub related projects can be found here.