From Robot Arm to Intentional Agent: the Articulated Head

Robot arms have come a long way from the humble beginnings of the first Unimate robot at a General Motors plant installed to unload parts from a die-casting machine to the flexible and versatile tool ubiquitous and indispensable in many fields of industrial production nowadays. The other chapters of this book attest to the progress in the field and the plenitude of applications of robot arms. It is still fair, however, to say that currently industrial robot arms are primarily applied in continuously repeated manufacturing task for which they are pre-programmed. They are known for their precision and reliability but in general use only limited sensory input and the changes in the execution of their task due to varying environmental factors are minimal. If one was to compare a robot arm with an animal, even a very simple one, this property of robot arm applications would immediately stand out as one of the most striking differences. Living organisms must sense changes in the environment that are crucial to their survival and must have some flexibility to adjust their behaviour. In most robot arm contexts, such a comparison is currently at best of academic interest, though it might gain relevance very quickly in the future if robot arms are to be used to assist humans to a larger extend than at present. If robot arms will work in close proximity with and directly supporting humans in accomplishing a task, it becomes inevitable for the control system of the robot to have far reaching situational awareness and the capability to adjust its ‘behaviour’ according to the acquired situational information. In addition, robot perception and action have to conform a large degree to the expectations of the human co-worker

From rituals to magic: Interactive art and HCI of the past, present, and future

The connection between art and technology is much tighter than is commonly recognized. The emergence of aesthetic computing in the early 2000s has brought renewed focus on this relationship. In this article, we articulate how art and Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) are compatible with each other and actually essential to advance each other in this era, by briefly addressing interconnected components in both areas—interaction, creativity, embodiment, affect, and presence. After briefly introducing the history of interactive art, we discuss how art and HCI can contribute to one another by illustrating contemporary examples of art in immersive environments, robotic art, and machine intelligence in art. Then, we identify challenges and opportunities for collaborative efforts between art and HCI. Finally, we reiterate important implications and pose future directions. This article is intended as a catalyst to facilitate discussions on the mutual benefits of working together in the art and HCI communities. It also aims to provide artists and researchers in this domain with suggestions about where to go next

ENVirT: inference of ecological characteristics of viruses from metagenomic data

Background Estimating the parameters that describe the ecology of viruses,particularly those that are novel, can be made possible using metagenomic approaches. However, the best-performing existing methods require databases to first estimate an average genome length of a viral community before being able to estimate other parameters, such as viral richness. Although this approach has been widely used, it can adversely skew results since the majority of viruses are yet to be catalogued in databases. Results In this paper, we present ENVirT, a method for estimating the richness of novel viral mixtures, and for the first time we also show that it is possible to simultaneously estimate the average genome length without a priori information. This is shown to be a significant improvement over database-dependent methods, since we can now robustly analyze samples that may include novel viral types under-represented in current databases. We demonstrate that the viral richness estimates produced by ENVirT are several orders of magnitude higher in accuracy than the estimates produced by existing methods named PHACCS and CatchAll when benchmarked against simulated data. We repeated the analysis of 20 metavirome samples using ENVirT, which produced results in close agreement with complementary in virto analyses. Conclusions These insights were previously not captured by existing computational methods. As such, ENVirT is shown to be an essential tool for enhancing our understanding of novel viral populations.This work was supported partially by Australia Research Council [grant numbers LP140100670 and DP150103512] and the Biodiversity Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. DJ, DH, DS and YS were funded by the MIFRS and MIRS scholarships of The University of Melbourne. Publication costs were funded by The Australian National University

Thinking head: Towards human centred robotics

Thinking Head project is a multidisciplinary approach to building intelligent agents for human machine interaction. The Thinking Head Framework evolved out of the Thinking Head Project and it facilitates loose coupling between various components and forms the central nerve system in a multimodal perception-action system. The paper presents the overall architecture, components and the attention system. The paper then concludes with a preliminary behavioral experiment that studies the intelligibility of the audiovisual speech output produced by the Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) that is part of the system. These results provide the baseline for future evaluations of the system as the project progresses through multiple evaluate and refine cycles

Engineering the Arts

This book is a result of chance encounters, random discussions and a colluding collaboration between an engineer, a scientist and an artist. From the onset, the interdisciplinary nature has set us on a colliding course of ideas, expectations and interests. While interdisciplinary research is celebrated en masse by funding agencies, government bodies and the academia, researchers who embrace interdisciplinarity live a distinctly strenuous life with little recognition for their efforts that appear to fall into the chasm between the established norms and practices of the constituent disciplines. Here, we anecdotally backtrack our journey through the years, homage to the individuals who assume flexible identities, seeking out adventures beyond the confinements of their chosen field

Stereo Vision Based Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping: A Human Centred Approach

This book addresses aspects of the Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) problem in autonomous navigation. The SLAM problem arises when a mobile robotic system is deployed in an unknown environment where the system has to concurrently build a map of the environment while localising itself within this map. Various algorithms have evolved over the years with varying degrees of sophistication, practical utility and efficiency. Some algorithms are particularly suited for specific applications while some others are specifically designed for a particular suite of sensors. This work looks at SLAM using stereo vision as the primary sensor and provides insights into potential pitfalls and alternative approaches in tackling the problem. Particularly, this work takes a human centred approach in developing the algorithms providing new researchers taking up this field with novel ideas for further exploration, especially in the emerging field of human-robot interaction (HRI)