Robot
-
Sona Kwak wins first prize in international robot design contest
Sona Kwak wins first prize in international robot design contest
Sona Kwak (Doctor’s course, Department of Industrial Design) won the first prize in an international robot design contest.
Kwak exhibited an emotional robot of ‘Hamie’ at ‘Robot Design Contest for Students’ in Ro-Man 2006/ The 15th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, which was held at University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom for three days from September 6 (Wed) and obtained the glory of the first prize.
‘Hamie’, the work of the first prize, has been devised in terms of emotional communication among human beings. The design concept of ‘Hamie’ is a portable emotional robot that can convey even ‘intimacy’ using senses of seeing, hearing, and touching beyond a simple communication function. The design of ‘Hamie’ was estimated to best coincide with the topic of the contest in consideration of its function that allows emotional mutual action between human beings as well as mutual action between human and robot, or robot and robot. ‘Hamie’ is not an actual embodiment but proposed as ‘a concept and design of a robot’.
‘Ro-man’ is a world-famous academic conference in the research field of mutual action between robot and human being, and ‘Robot Design Contest for Students’ is a contest to scout for creative and artistic ideas on the design and structure of future robots and exhibits works from all over world.
Kwak is now seeking to develop the contents and designs of various next-generation service robots such as ▲ ottoro ? cleaning robot ▲ robot for blind ▲ robot for the old ▲ robot for education assistance ▲ robot for office affairs ▲ ubiquitos robot in her lab (PES Design Lab) led by Professor Myungseok Kim.
“I’ve considered and been disappointed about the role of designers in robot engineering while I’ve been designing robots. I am very proud that my robot design has been recognized in an academic conference of world-famous robot engineers and gained confidence,” Kwak said.
2006.09.27 View 17561 -
KAIST Develops Thinking, Feeling Human-Like Robot
By Kim Tae-gyu / Staff ReporterTHE KOREA TIMES 2005.1.31(page 1)
South Korean scientists created the world"s first artificial species, a software robot with ``genes"" and ``chromosomes.""
Kim Jong-hwan, professor at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said Sunday his team had developed a robot with 14 chromosomes, which gives the machine a ``personality.""
``This robot is a software-based one, sometimes called a sobot. It has a unique synthetic character determined by its specific combination of 14 chromosomes,"" the 47-year-old Kim said.
When Kim"s team gave a stimulus to the chromosome-equipped sobots, they showed totally different responses even under the same environment due to their distinctive personalities.
Several cognitive sensors enable the prototype models to identify 47 differing outside stimuli. The virtual robots also have 77 behavior patterns.
``Because a sobot is basically a software system, it can easily travel to other robots and multiply. In the middle of such processes, it can evolve through crossover and mutation,"" Kim said.
With the development of associated technologies, Kim expected the number of chromosomes would be augmented as sobots evolve to a more sophisticated species in the future.
The capacity to load large volumes of data is related to the evolution of sobots. Currently, 14 chromosomes consist of roughly 2,000 bytes of data.
The effort to incorporate the sobot into a platform, robot hardware, is now underway and Kim"s team looks to unveil the new-concept species as soon as next month.
``Diverse behavior patterns driven by sobots" specific personalities will be precisely translated into action just like the soul rules the body,"" Kim said.
Kim did not think the robotic evolution would lead to the human race being threatened; the concept of the recent blockbuster ``I, Robot.""
``If we design the chromosomes safely, the self-reproducing robot will not post a threat back to us,"" Kim said.
Kim first revealed the robotic breakthrough at a keynote speech of the International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents, held in New Zealand last December.
Kim is also known as pioneer in the field of robot football and has headed the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association (FIRA) since its foundation in 1999.
voc200@koreatimes.co.kr
2005.02.02 View 17426