Videos

I work in the Humanoid Robotics Group at MIT CSAIL with Prof. Rodney Brooks along with many other great people. This page contains a few video demonstrations of bits and pieces from my own work and collaborations (for background information and more detail, please look here).


Video:  Shadow detection
Coco tracks the shadow of its arm, which allows it to estimate the time to contact with a surface, even without much texture (where stereo might fail).
   AVI -- (7.4 MB)
   Length: approximately 20 seconds


Video:  Object localization
Babybot learns the appearance of objects handed to it, and then can find them again and pick them up. I was responsible for the object localization component.
   AVI -- (33 MB)
   Length: a few minutes

   Robot's view MOV -- (4 MB)
   Robot's view AVI -- (56 MB)
   Length: about a minute



Video:  Object naming
In this video, Cog is given a name for the objects in its workspace (a car and a ball). Then, when these names are spoken, the robot turns back to look at the appropriate object, even though they have left its field of view. See the next few videos for how Cog learns to recognize objects in the first place.
   Quicktime -- (7.4 MB)
   Length: approximately 30 seconds


Video:  Active segmentation
Cog taps a toy with his flipper and uses the motion to segment the object from the background.
   Quicktime -- (2.0 MB)
   Length: approximately 20 seconds


Video:  Head segmentation (the hard way)
Cog uses active segmentation to separate my head out from the background. The hair and face are correctly grouped. This movie is an homage to Matt Williamson's safety demo. It shows Cog's perspective while batting my head around.
   MPEG1 -- (90 kB)
   Length: approximately 10 seconds


Video:  Open object recognition
In this video, Cog is confronted with a new object (a red ball). Since it has limited experience at this point, it confuses the ball with another object (a cube) which has similar color. Once Cog pokes the object, after about 5 seconds processing it can correctly distinguish between these objects based on shape.
   Quicktime -- (6.7 MB)
   Length: approximately 1 minute


Video:  Role transfer
Role transfer. Kismet watches human sorting green objects to one side and yellow objects to other. When prompted, robot says the direction it expects a new object to go.
   Quicktime -- (1.5 MB)
   Length: approximately 1.5 minutes


Video:  Learning through activity
In this video, the operator tells Cog they are going to "find" a "toma". Then they look at several objects in turn, saying "no" to each. Finally the operator shows Cog a bottle and says "yes". Cog then associates the name "toma" with the bottle, by analogy with previous search episodes.
   Quicktime -- (23.5 MB)
   Length: 1.5 minutes


Video:  Platform Shoe
Using a forward-mounted camera on a shoe, a wearable system can view the wearer's local environment. When the shoe is pressed against the ground during walking, the image is stable and in a simple ground-aligned orientation. This movie shows the camera's perspective, and some simple estimation of the phase of walking from visual information. It is sped up by a factor of about two relative to real-time.
   MPEG1 -- (18.4 MB)
   Length: 1.5 minutes


Video:  Opening a door
In this video, a robot (Cardea, with a single arm at this point) locates a door, pushes it open, and goes through -- all autonomously. I did computer vision stuff for this project.
   AVI -- (29 MB)
   Length: 1.5 minutes


Video:  Conversational turn taking
Speech recognition, generation and eye contact combine to allow Kismet to engage two people in proto-conversation (where the structure of a conversation is present, but the words are just infant-like babble).
   Quicktime -- (2.1 MB)
   Length: approximately 50 seconds


More information
See my research page for details of all these topics, or view publications and presentations.



               
               
               
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