Cognitive-developmental learning for a humanoid robot : a caregiver's gift

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-341).(cont.) which are then applied to developmentally acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes. Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which still lies only in the realm of our imagination. Our efforts towards such a dimly imaginable task are developed according to two alternate and complementary views: cognitive and developmental.The goal of this work is to build a cognitive system for the humanoid robot, Cog, that exploits human caregivers as catalysts to perceive and learn about actions, objects, scenes, people, and the robot itself. This thesis addresses a broad spectrum of machine learning problems across several categorization levels. Actions by embodied agents are used to automatically generate training data for the learning mechanisms, so that the robot develops categorization autonomously. Taking inspiration from the human brain, a framework of algorithms and methodologies was implemented to emulate different cognitive capabilities on the humanoid robot Cog. This framework is effectively applied to a collection of AI, computer vision, and signal processing problems. Cognitive capabilities of the humanoid robot are developmentally created, starting from infant-like abilities for detecting, segmenting, and recognizing percepts over multiple sensing modalities. Human caregivers provide a helping hand for communicating such information to the robot. This is done by actions that create meaningful events (by changing the world in which the robot is situated) thus inducing the "compliant perception" of objects from these human-robot interactions. Self-exploration of the world extends the robot's knowledge concerning object properties. This thesis argues for enculturating humanoid robots using infant development as a metaphor for building a humanoid robot's cognitive abilities. A human caregiver redesigns a humanoid's brain by teaching the humanoid robot as she would teach a child, using children's learning aids such as books, drawing boards, or other cognitive artifacts. Multi-modal object properties are learned using these tools and inserted into several recognition schemes,by Artur Miguel Do Amaral Arsenio.Ph.D

Hand gesture recognition for a virtual mouse application using geometric feature of finger's trajectories

© 2015 ACM. We aim to enable a computer to comprehend and perform the mouse functions by analyzing a video with hand motions. For this purpose, dynamic gestures are captured by a web cam and are recognized as pre-defined gestures which are used to suggest mouse functions. The proposed algorithm initially detects the hand. Then, it tracks fingertips' trajectories within a frame sequence. Finally, hand gestures are recognized through computing a set of proposed geometric features of fingers' trajectories and comparing with our collected gestures dataset. In this paper, four types of descriptors are defined for a dynamic gesture. Each descriptor includes different number of features, which compose a feature vector with 135 dimensions. Different classification algorithms (e.g. KNN, LDA, Naïve Bayes and SVM) are applied to compare the detection results. The minimal misclassification error rate (MCR) reaches about 4% (i.e. Correct Recognition rate of 96%). Furthermore, we applied Principle Component Analysis (PCA) to reduce the number of features. With 30 dimensional features (principle components), LDA classifier can achieve about 0.09% misclassification error rate

Recent Advances in Signal Processing

The signal processing task is a very critical issue in the majority of new technological inventions and challenges in a variety of applications in both science and engineering fields. Classical signal processing techniques have largely worked with mathematical models that are linear, local, stationary, and Gaussian. They have always favored closed-form tractability over real-world accuracy. These constraints were imposed by the lack of powerful computing tools. During the last few decades, signal processing theories, developments, and applications have matured rapidly and now include tools from many areas of mathematics, computer science, physics, and engineering. This book is targeted primarily toward both students and researchers who want to be exposed to a wide variety of signal processing techniques and algorithms. It includes 27 chapters that can be categorized into five different areas depending on the application at hand. These five categories are ordered to address image processing, speech processing, communication systems, time-series analysis, and educational packages respectively. The book has the advantage of providing a collection of applications that are completely independent and self-contained; thus, the interested reader can choose any chapter and skip to another without losing continuity

Exploiting quaternions to support expressive interactive character motion

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 261-266).A real-time motion engine for interactive synthetic characters, either virtual or physical, needs to allow expressivity and interactivity of motion in order to maintain the illusion of life. Canned animation examples from an animator or motion capture device are expressive, but not very interactive, often leading to repetition. Conversely, numerical procedural techniques such as Inverse Kinematics (IK) tend to be very interactive, but often appear "robotic" and require parameter tweaking by hand. We argue for the use of hybrid example-based learning techniques to incorporate expert knowledge of character motion in the form of animations into an interactive procedural engine. Example-based techniques require appropriate distance metrics, statistical analysis and synthesis primitives, along with the ability to blend examples; furthermore, many machine learning techniques are sensitive to the choice of representation. We show that a quaternion representation of the orientation of a joint affords us computational efficiency along with mathematical robustness, such as avoiding gimbal lock in the Euler angle representation. We show how to use quaternions and their exponential mappings to create distance metrics on character poses, perform simple statistical analysis of joint motion limits and blend multiple poses together. We demonstrate these joint primitives on three techniques which we consider useful for combining animation knowledge with procedural algorithms: 1) pose blending, 2) joint motion statistics and 3) expressive IK. We discuss several projects designed using these primitives and offer insights for programmers building real-time motion engines for expressive interactive characters.by Michael Patrick Johnson.Ph.D

Second Annual Workshop on Space Operations Automation and Robotics (SOAR 1988)

Papers presented at the Second Annual Workshop on Space Operation Automation and Robotics (SOAR '88), hosted by Wright State University at Dayton, Ohio, on July 20, 21, 22, and 23, 1988, are documented herein. During the 4 days, approximately 100 technical papers were presented by experts from NASA, the USAF, universities, and technical companies. Panel discussions on Human Factors, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Space Systems were held but are not documented herein. Technical topics addressed included knowledge-based systems, human factors, and robotics

A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 5: Periodical Articles--Secondary References, Alphabetical Listing

This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. Volume 5 includes "passing" or "secondary" references, i.e. those entries that are passing in nature or contain very brief information or content

A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 6: Periodical Articles, Subject Listing, By De Waal Category

This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. Volume 6 presents the periodical literature arranged by subject categories (as originally devised for the De Waal bibliography and slightly modified here)

A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 9: All Formats—Combined Alphabetical Listing

This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. This volume contains all listings in all formats, arranged alphabetically by author or main entry. In other words, it combines the listings from Volume 1 (Monograph and Serial Titles), Volume 3 (Periodical Articles), and Volume 7 (Audio/Visual Materials) into a comprehensive bibliography. (There may be additional materials included in this list, e.g. duplicate items and items not yet fully edited.) As in the other volumes, coverage of this material begins around 1994, the final year covered by De Waal's bibliography, but may not yet be totally up-to-date (given the ongoing nature of this bibliography). It is hoped that other titles will be added at a later date. At present, this bibliography includes 12,594 items

Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed