New issue of IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development

It is our pleasure to announce you the release of the latest issue of the IEEE CIS Newsletter on Autonomous Mental Development, available at:

http://www.cse.msu.edu/amdtc/amdnl/AMDNL-V8-N2.pdf

This issue of the newsletter presents a stimulating dialog exploring the frontiers of developmental and evolutionary robotics, within the so-called evo-devo approach which might become more and more central in our research in the future. Yaochu Jin and Yan Meng asked a question about the interaction between phylogeny, ontogeny and epigenesis, as well as about the interaction between morphological and mental development:

“Evolutionary Developmental Robotics – The Next Step to Go?”

Answers by Josh Bongard, Daniel Polani, Stéphane Doncieux, Fumiya Iida, Nicolas Bredeche, Jean-Marc Montanier, Simon Carrignon, and Gunnar Tufte show that we are just at the beginning of novel far-reaching conceptual and technological projects, exploring questions such as how development can be the articulation between evolution and learning or how new materials can allow us to explore growing bodies and their impact on cognitive development.

Robot life emerged at Fondation Cartier

The Flowers-Fields platform has evolved into a brand new robot species which is now pursuing its development among the exhibition Mathématiques – Un dépaysement soudain (Mathematics – A Beautiful elsewhere) at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. The platform is named Ergo-Robots for this exhibition, in relation to Micha Gromov’s Ergo-systems, whose collaboration with Pierre-Yves Oudeyer initiated the project.

The robots have gained a new egg-shaped living environment and new faces, both designed by David Lynch and his team. We also have been working hard to design a new set of moods and behaviors that also deeply transformed the platform appearance.

We strongly encourage those of you spending some time in Paris until March to come to Fondation Cartier, and have a look and the opportunity to interact with Ergo-Robot platform !

More information and pictures can be found on our website dedicated page and some nice video of the installation will soon be available…

The Flowers team.

ICDL – EpiRob 2011

The first joint edition of the ICDL-EpiRob conferences just ended in Frankfurt. The conference itself was very exciting, and led to many stimulating discussions and exchange for those of us attending.

The Flowers team presented three papers:

• Mai’s talk on Bootstrapping intrinsically motivated learning with human demonstration,
• Manuel and Thomas’ poster on The Interaction of maturational constraints and intrinsic motivations in active motor development,
• and Adrien’s poster on Simultaneous acquisition of task and feedback model.

Four of us were also presenting posters on our ongoing work:

• Imitating operations on internal cognitive structures for language acquisition, by Thomas,
• Modeling maturational constraints for learning biped humanoid locomotion, by Matthieu,
• Intrinsically motivated goal space creation for autonomous goal-directed exploration in high-dimension  unbounded sensorimotor spaces, by Fabien,
• Unsupervised learning of simultaneous motor primitives through imitation, by Olivier.

We are very proud of Mai whose paper just finished second for the best student paper.

We have returned from the conference with new ideas and perspectives, and are looking forward to next edition of the conference.

FLOWERS Team at InnoRobo

Last week a few members of the FLOWERS team packed their bags and robots and set off to attend the InnoRobo Innovation Robotic Summit which was held in Lyon between the 23rd and 25th March to showcase two of our robots: Acroban and FlowersFields.

InnoRobo was established as a chance for international players in the service robotics industry to meet and share new ideas about robotics and their future. There were over 100 robots exhibited of which 30 were shown for the first time in Europe.

Our newest version of FlowersFields proved quite a success. The flowers interactive modes were very well received, as volunteers to stand in front of the flowers and wave their arms around madly never ceased. Their improved motion and ascetic appearance did credit to the hard work the team put in before the exhibition.

Acroban was quite the celebrity and performed well in front of a continuous captive audience. We can only hope that popularity and fame has not gone to his head….

There was a very high quality of attendees with representatives from ALDEBARAN with their army of Nao robots; Gostai and their telepresence robots Jazz; and the ECCERobot, a result of collaboration between research centres and Robot Studio, which focuses on mimicking the human form. For the Flowers team it was a very valuable experience. Important contacts were made with both business and research.

InnoRobo was well covered, and our robots got a lot of publicity. For those who are interested in seeing our robots in the media, here are a few interesting links:

• TV Appearances
  • TF1: Des robots à l’image de l’homme
  • JTech45: iPad 2, 3DS, salon Innorobo
• Radio
  • France Info: Acroban, le robot humanoide
• Newpaper
  • Le Point: La robotique s’empare des sciences humaines

New FlowersFields platform in progress…

The team is currently hard at work on a new hardware platform for the Flowers Fields experiment, and the lab is currently filled with drilling, cutting and filling noises.

The key feature of the new version is the Dynamixel RX-28 and RX-64 motors that now replace the previous AX-12 for improved robustness, smoothness and compliance.

Focus has been put on general robustness and on the integration of new sensors in order to develop a wider range of interactions with the lamps.

A brand new lamp shade color scheme also gives them  a refreshing look, already suggesting life and energy.

The new platform will be part of our exposition at the European INNO-ROBOT summit, on the 23, 24 and 25 of March 2011 in Lyon, France. We are looking forward to meeting you there, and for the most impatient ones, here are some pictures of our work in progress.

3rd French German Workshop HLR 2011

The Acroban project was presented by Olivier LY at the French/German Workshop Humanoid & Legged Robots in Paris, the 14 & 15 february 2011.

The workshop was very interesting, a lot of impressive robots and controls were presented.

Because of their research subjects similar to ours, we particularly enjoyed the presentation of A.Seyfarth from the Lauflabor about how leg compliance shapes the way we moves. And the work of O.von Stryk from the SIM TU Darmstadt about compliant actuation and control of bio-inspired Humanoid Robot Motion.

Flowers Team at INNO-ROBOT

Flowers team is proud to announce its participation to the first INNO-ROBOT  summit on service robot innovation, which will happen in Lyon on 23, 24 and 25 of March 2011.

More information is available at http://www.innorobo.com/wordpress/ and http://www.innorobo.com/wordpress/inria-flowers.

We hope we will see you there !

Flowers Team

New FlowersFields video available !

In the coming decades, robots might arrive to our homes. What if, instead of humanoid servants, we saw traditional objects of the home become robots ? Lamps, flowers, sculptures, …, robots with a spark of life… Curious, aesthetic, social, stimulating our imagination.

Find more about our Flowers Fields installation, by watching  the video on our YouTube channel or on the team web site.

Welcome !

Welcome to FLOWERS team new blog !

We hope you will enjoy the content of this blog. You can visit our web site http://flowers.inria.fr.

The FLOWERS team.