Confidence in expressing novel textures - an analysis of Japanese ideophones that describe visually-induced textures

Although a close relationship between the emergence of a new expression and that of either a new object or concept is presupposed in linguistic analysis, the correlation has not been pursued thoroughly. This paper investigates how people respond to different novel textures within language. We carried out an experiment using an application that displays visually-induced texture. Participants were presented with two types of novel texture: one had a time delay between touching and the texture’s response to this and the other did not. Participants were asked to describe the texture with ideophones (sound symbolic words) in Japanese. We observed what kinds of ideophones were used and the confidence with which they were expressed, which produced two results. First, there was a significant difference between the two texture types regarding confidence. For the texture with a delay, active touch was required for subjects to express it with a high level of confidence. Second, when the expressions were made with high confidence, the texture with a delay was expressed with significantly more unconventional ideophones than that without delay

Design of a Movable Tensegrity Arm with Springs Modeling an Upper and Lower Arm

Tensegrity is a structure consisting of rigid bodies and internal tensile members, with no contact between the rigid bodies. The model of an arm with a tensegrity structure is not movable as it is, but we believe that it can be made movable and flexible by incorporating springs. We developed an arm that incorporates springs in the arm’s tensile members by extending the model of an arm with a tensegrity structure. Then, as an evaluation of the developed arm, we measured the ranges of motions and the forces required for that motion. We also developed a mechanism that allows the arm to bend and extend. We believe that this method of making the tensegrity arm controllable by incorporating springs will be useful in the development of flexible robotic arms for caregiving using robots and other applications

ニューラルネットワークを用いた認知実験とシミュレーションによるアクティブパーセプションの構成論的研究

University of Tokyo (東京大学

Making a Robot Dance to Music Using Chaotic Itinerancy in a Network of FitzHugh-Nagumo Neurons

Abstract. We propose a technique to make a robot execute free and solitary dance movements on music, in a manner which simulates the dynamic alternations between synchronisation and autonomy typically observed in human behaviour. In contrast with previous approaches, we preprogram neither the dance patterns nor their alternation, but rather build in basic dynamics in the robot, and let the behaviour emerge in a seemingly autonomous manner. The robot motor commands are generated in real-time by converting the output of a neural network processing a sequence of pulses corresponding to the beats of the music being danced to. The spiking behaviour of individual neurons is controlled by a biologically-inspired model (FitzHugh-Nagumo). Under appropriate parameters, the network generates chaotic itinerant behaviour among low-dimensional local attractors. A robot controlled this way exhibits a variety of motion styles, some being periodic and strongly coupled to the musical rhythm and others being more independent, as well as spontaneous jumps from one style of motion to the next. The resulting behaviour is completely deterministic (as the solution of a non-linear dynamical system), adaptive to the music being played, and believed to be an interesting compromise between synchronisation and autonomy.