Development of an artificial brain for LifeRobot

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Abstract

In this paper, some of the results for the development of an artificial brain for LifeRobot “Tarou” developed at Artificial Life and Robotics Laboratory of The University of Oita are introduced. Solutions for questions on how to build the artificial brain and how to implement the artificial brain are presented from vision and voice input signals to wheel control, head control, camera control, speech, touch screen, LED status output. Also, the research issues of Tarou are stated and discussed. It is shown that the artificial brain developed provides Tarou with abilities to perceive an environment, to interact with humans, to make intelligent decisions and to learn new skills.

Introduction

The objective of our research is that the artificial brain has to provide the robot with abilities to perceive an environment, to interact with humans, to make intelligent decisions and to learn new skills. Application areas of the LifeRobot is for human welfare, service tasks, and data collection and processing, etc.

The research issues of LifeRobot prototype are navigation, learning, information processing, human–robot interface, and reasoning. In the navigation, Mobile robot localization is investigated. The problem is to estimate the robot location in environment using sensor data. Localization issues are position tracking, global localization; recovery from errors and incorrect location information. In the navigation, path planning is investigated. The problem is to find out how to move to the desired place based on the topological map of the environment. In the learning, learning skills is investigated. Learning issues are to provide intelligent robot with an ability to adapt to changes in environment and to eliminate the need in robot programming by allowing the robot to interactively acquire new skills. In the human–robot interface, face tracking is considered. The problem is to find a face in the image taken by robot’s cameras and trace its movements. These problems are under our investigations. This paper describes the new techniques developed in our researches for LifeRobot.

Section snippets

Research issues of LifeRobot

The LifeRobot prototype developed at Artificial Life and Robotics Laboratory at The University of Oita is called “Tarou”. The picture of Tarou is shown in Fig. 1. The main specifications are listed in Table 1. The research issues of LifeRobot is shown in Fig. 2. As stated in Section 1, there are five main research issues, namely, navigation, information processing, learning, human–robot interface, and reasoning. These issues are concerned with the design of the artificial brain for the

Artificial brain of LifeRobot “Tarou”

The hardware is shown in Fig. 3 where two CCD cameras, two computers, two DC motors, one stepping motor, six ultra sonic sensors, 5 LEDs are installed. One portable computer is used for voice recognition and command executing system (however, this computer is replaced by the above two computers later).

The analogy of brain functions between human being and robot is shown in Fig. 4(a) and (b). The correspondence between human being brain and robot brain is clear. However, human brain is much more

Conclusions

In this paper a part of the results obtained for development of the artificial brain for LifeRobot Tarou was described briefly. The development of the artificial brain by LSI chip(System on Chip) has been developed as another project based on the LifeRobot’s artificial brain results. The concept of the artificial brain will be used for biologically inspired dynamic bipedal humanoid robots driven by motors or artificial muscles and this project is under investigation. Finally, the idea of the

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