Bandit, a robot built by researchers at the University of Southern California, interacts with autistic children. Three-foot-tall Bandit can maintain “eye” contact with an autistic child and, sometimes, use playful or sympathetic actions to overcome withdrawn behavior.
Another robot, named RUBI—Robot Using Bayesian Inference—at the University of California, San Diego, images children’s faces, recognizes basic emotions from facial muscle movement, and responds with verbal and physical gestures of encouragement.
These service robots are part of a rapidly growing wave of robotic human helpers. In the classroom they may supplement the work of human teachers, during surgery they may perform delicate procedures, and on the battlefield they may help disarm a roadside bomb, as described in our June 2010 cover story.
Blurring the boundaries
The technological differences between these service robots—with their vision and image processing functions—and robots used in industrial applications can be small. For example, one of our Snapshot articles in this issue describes the work of researchers at the Technical University of Munich who are imaging non-verbal communications such as gestures and facial expressions as a method of interacting with robots. To date, they have demonstrated that their work can help those who require assisted living as well as workers in automated production plants, where background noise may make speech recognition difficult.
On the factory floor, new software packages are also advancing the role of vision in industrial robotic applications. New graphical software packages are uniting third-party image-processing libraries with robot controller software, as described in a Technology Trends article by editor Andy Wilson. In a demonstration during AUTOMATICA in Munich, for example, four anthropomorphic robots fed objects into a structured-light based scanner and the resulting 3-D view could then be used for robot guidance, measurements, and quality inspection.
Our Product Focus cover story on linescan cameras and web inspection, also by Andy Wilson, brings us back to the traditional area of focus for Vision Systems Design: the integration of components and software into machine-vision systems. New linescan cameras—which can also be used in 3-D imaging systems to guide robots—are enabling higher-speed web applications to be developed with increasingly higher resolution.
Machine-vision and image-processing technologies continue to develop in fascinating and useful ways both in industrial and non-industrial applications. While such technologies may be more mature in industrial applications, newer applications like service robotics will emerge to generate increased revenue for component suppliers and system integrators.W. Conard Holton, Editor in Chief
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