The Climate World Summit COP 21 is taking place in Paris. Governments from all countries are discussing policies to deal with the global warming. While we can expect a new agreement that will help making a step forward, it is likely to be insufficient to fully address the problem. There were already 20 previous summits, but none of them stopped the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Let's face it, the top-down approach is broken. The answer should come from ...

The importance of emotional expression as part of human communication has been understood since the seventeenth century, and has been explored scientifically since Charles Darwin and others in the nineteenth century. Recent advances in Psychology have greatly improved our understanding of the role of affect in communication, perception, decision-making, attention and memory. At the same time, advances in technology mean that it is becoming possible for machines to sense, analyse and express emotions. We can now consider how these advances ...

A great mystery is how human infants develop: how they discover their bodies, how they learn to interact with objects and social peers, and accumulate new skills all over their lives. Such development is organized and progressive, and results from the complex growth processes and interaction between brain mechanisms, the physical and the social environment. Constructing robots, and building mechanisms that model such developmental processes, is key to advance our understanding of human development, in constant dialogue with human and ...

Murray Shanahan is Professor of Cognitive Robotics in the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he heads the Neurodynamics Group. His publications span artificial intelligence, robotics, logic, dynamical systems, computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. He was scientific advisor to the film Ex Machina, which was partly inspired by his book “Embodiment and the Inner Life” (OUP, 2010). In the two videos below, he describes what he sees as the main obstacles to achieving human-level artificial intelligence given ...

Some of my students worked on this project. They used Pharo, ROS, as well as Choregraphe to make Nao write arbitrary text. Since the robot motion is not very precise, they made up a simple but smart solution to allow the robot can push the page after writing each letter. Source code is available on GitHub. This project was first initiated by Sophie Liuu and Joris Sittler in 2014 (first part of video below). In the first version, Nao was ...

A MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), on Binaural Hearing for Robots will start on May 11th, 2015. It will adress fundamental issues in robot hearing and will describe methodologies requiring two or more microphones embedded into a robot head, thus enabling sound-source localization, sound-source separation, and fusion of auditory and visual information (see video below). This MOOC was produced by Inria’s MoocLab, as part of the uTOP project (http://utop.fr/ - http://utop.inria.fr/). It targets students with good background in signal processing ...

Building robots with a minimal number of actuators is compelling. It allows for a reduction of cost, weight, as well as energy consumption. Besides, the robot needs to carry less battery. However, minimizing the number of actuators is not an easy task. People from UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab have been investigating small legged robots for a while. They came up with a neat solution that requires only 1 single motor. The robot called 1STAR (1 actuator STeerAble Robot) is ...

A team of french scientists in developmental robotics led by Olivier Georgeon is launching the IDEAL MOOC on developmental robotics and AI. This free online course targets a wide audience, since no prior background is required. It aims at introducing the cognitive science and programming basics required to design robots and virtual agents capable of self learning by mere experience. They try some motor actions and analyze their outcomes using their sensors. This curiosity driven process is similar to how ...

In this tutorial, we show how to use the Arduino Yún to connect a USB device through Wifi to your Linux based computer. We rely on the USB/IP project that allows USB device sharing over IP networks. This utility is really useful and has many applications. A simple one is to turn a plain USB webcam into one that you can access remotely through Wifi. But, it can apply to virtually any USB device and make it available remotely, paving ...

The original Arduino Yún and its successor the Arduino Yún Rev. 2 are a mixture of an Arduino board with a WiFi connected Linux board. And, of course those two parts are bridged, so you can easily build applications that interact with their environment via the digital or analog pints, and run a web server or perform some computations on the Linux part (See Video 1 below). In this tutorial, we will get started with the Yún. I’ll also provide ...