Posted 11.30.2011 at 10:56 am
10 Comments
Qbo Sees Himself
TheCorpora
Qbo (pronounced "cue-bee-oh") is a newish robot designed by TheCorpora, which in addition to general cuteness boasts some impressive speech and object recognition abilities. But what happens if you put an object recognition robot in a position to see...itself?
Qbo, to its credit, deals with this kind of existential crisis an awful lot better than I would. After identifying the Linux penguin as simply "penguin" (Qbo is built on Linux, hence that particular choice of penguin), Qbo encounters a mirror. "Who is this?" says Qbo's handler, in a statement that would break the will of a lesser 'bot. After being told that the image in the mirror is itself, Qbo then utters exactly the kind of statement we all wish we could say when looking at ourselves in the mirror: "Oh, this is me. Nice."
According to the Qbo blog, this is definitely a designed reaction--Qbo was programmed to utter those phrases when its various shape- and face-recognition tools identified itself in the mirror. But it's still a curiously touching moment, and the Qbo folks are working on a few further developments--namely, autonomous recognition (so Qbo won't have to be told that the object in the mirror is itself) and a way to distinguish so if presented with another Qbo, the first won't assume the second is itself in a mirror.
[The Corpora via Engadget]
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"a way to distinguish so if presented with another Qbo, the first won't assume the second is itself in a mirror"
Just give it a big mole or other asymmetrical facial feature; problem solved.
When it's pre-programmed to recognize such features, it's really not that impressive, I mean kodak can slap face recognition in a point-and-shoot camera. When bots can look in a mirror, and deduct through matching movements and visual perpective deviations that they are looking in a mirror at themselves, then it's impressive.
robots arent learning anything, we are coding their decision based system.
What needs to be invented is code that writes itself to give machines new abilities with just in time compilation
Reminds me of the waffle bot in A Harold and Kumar Christmas
awesome. not so impressive but still its a step closer to Terminator.
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Oh man words fail me. Like midoman said, we need to right a code that could a robot otal ai. But then the robots take over lol
What about getting a robot to expect things to occur. For instance, when a person says goodbye the robot expects the person to leave, but only after observing their disappearance after saying so. And what about the ability to compare two objects and actually say they are similar and why they are similar. (watched some of the other videos :p)
there is actually a very advanced version of this robot made couple years ago which could have nice communication with people and recognise them and also get bored and sing and make things up, it was a learning bit of software. Unfortunately I heard it kinda went crazy in the end as it was given to some college and the students turned it into a nutjob. Ell well,
Heres an idea, why not first have the robot recognize reflective surfaces by comparing different things in the environment such a specific details shown in two directions, also have an infrared encrypted light and reader that shows a specific pattern unique to that robot. So, when the robot see to images that are exactly the same, the side that is reflectin his infrared pattern must be the mirror. Then recognize that he sees his own pattern along with the shape of a robot, therefore it can accurately say that the object he is seeing is him.
Need to speed up the recognition process right now it's at the level of an infant