There are a lot of robots doing various jobs for people nowadays such as housework, exhibition tasks, manufacturing and experimentation. Following this increasing trend of robot use, what we will be able to expect and see in our future The answer was given while the each speech has been made in FIRA RoboWorld Congress 2009.
The FIRA RoboWorld Congress 2009 hosted by the Incheon Metropolitan Government, held in the Ramada Songdo Hotel in Incheon Metropolitan city from Aug. 16 to 18, showed a lot of interesting topics regarding robot technologies with different subjects such as cooperative robotics, human robot interaction, educational robots and entertainment, and humanoid robotics.
Building a strong vision system for robot development such as face recognition, expression understanding, and motion tracking is one of the most important issues for the success of human-robot interaction. Researchers and developers have recently been giving attention to edge detection, basic units for measuring the strength of the vision system, and reported works based on designing a static mask, which sequentially moves through the pixels in the image to extract edges. Despite the success of this work, such statics still bring restrict the model's performance in some ways.
Abdul Rahman Hafiz from the University of Fukui in Japan gave a speech regarding outstanding trials to overcome these problems by designing a dynamic mask inspired by the basic principle of the retina, and which was supported by a unique distribution of photoreceptors. "We achieved excellent outcome on experiments that shows the validity of the proposed robot that proves a number of advantages to human-robot interaction such as accurate edge detection and better attention to the front end user," he said in his presentation. "I think this is a new step towards human-robot interaction."
The handshake has also become the most acceptable and favorable gesture of greeting in many cultures. John-John Cabibihan, professor of the National University of Singapore, gave a speech about Handshake Experiments and Finger Phalange Indentations in order to actualize the social touch abilities of prosthetics and sociable robots.
Imitating the soft hand which has been shown in his presentation will have a lot of potential contributions for our society, such as improving the emotional healing process of people who have lost their hands by enabling them to use a prosthetic hand even during a handshake. During the presentation, he described how it would be possible to design synthetic skin with human-like skin softness. This will also enable sociable robots of the future to exchange greetings with humans.
One of the critical requirements of robot technology is a soft humanlike robotic interface for more natural human-robot interaction. "Our approach will be able to address the safety and acceptance issues of robotic hands, and the experiments will be conducted to obtain the benchmark data for many fields including duplication with synthetic skin," John said in closing his presentation.
