I saw this singing robot at Wired magazine. Watch the video and read the subtitles closely, since much of it is in Japanese. This is Cool Science! A robot diva programmed to mimic a human singer’s facial movements breathing patterns.
Japanese engineers have taken a different tack in their robotic development, working to make more lifelike robots that will integrate well into human society. To do this, they’ve followed some interesting learning curves. I liked how they use maps of mouth movement and even integrating breathing patterns into the robot’s speech.
Did you catch the reference to using hidden Markov technology to train the robot when to breath? What they are referring to is (more…)
My daughter and I are planning on getting a lego robot and experimenting with it. Here is a video some teacher put together of her students working with them. This video is from TeacherTube, and I wish I knew more about it, other than this looks fun.
Just as the teacher/narrator says, there are lots of principles of math involved, most of which are not that advanced, even for young kids. This strikes me as a great way to increase interest in math, programming and engineering in school kids.
If you’ve read The Mysterious Benedict Society then you’ll remember that Mr. Curtain, the bad guy in the story, had developed his own power system using wave and tidal power. Here is a YouTube video of the AP news story with a brief report and description of actual work to harness the power of waves to produce electricity. Its a neat video showing some actual devices and deployments in the lab.
This is an exciting new direction, especially in light of the renewed interest in alternative sources of energy. Think of all the engineering challenges. What sort of materials will withstand the ocean environment for long periods of time and still maintain their functionality? What about barnacles and other ocean flora and fauna? Will they glom onto the apparatuses and bog them down or stop them dead in their tracks?
There are political challenges, as well. Where will these be placed? Will they interfere with fishing and recreation to a great enough extent that political barriers will be raised against their use? Doubtless, there are many challenges to satisfying our never ending needs for new sources of energy.
Here are two other interesting lines of questions I’m interested in here. What ecological effect would wave-energy farms have on ocean habitats and what economic conditions will need to exist for us to really break free of our dependence on oil and coal as our major sources of energy?
