The Super Mario Themes are meanwhile a cultural measure on how obscure devices, objects and instruments you can play music. Whether it's a ruler, two guitars, hands, tesla coils and lightning, bass guitar and so on and on. Or this video. Wine bottles, filled with water in a row. A remote-controlled car is driving along this bottles to play this music. Good guys. Proof of concept and hours of preperation spent.
For your convenince the incredible tesla coils again:
Maria Ralph and Medhat A. Moussa from the the University of Guelph in Ontario made a study about "Talking to Robots". They wanted participants, that they should begin to talk to a robot-arm in order to let the robots collect things that are normally around in the household like spoons and keys.
The individuals were given a list of a handful of simple phrases that they could use to verbally operate the robot, and they were also permitted and encouraged to develop new phrases that they thought might help the robot perform its task.
Instead of using speech recognition software, the researchers trained human operators to translate the participants' words into movements via a graphical user interface. When participants made up new commands, the operator prompted them to define these new commands with a series of simple commands from the list.
The researchers figured out that the participants tend to use simple phrases more than complex ones. The teaching progress of the human - robot interaction was similar to the teaching progress of small children.
People also tended to humanize their language compared with the simple commands. For example, simple commands such as "move left" became "move closer to me" or "move this way."
The participants also tended to encourage the robot when it was doing well, providing feedback much like humans give to children. For instance, they used phrases such as "you're almost there" and "you've got it" for correct motions, "that's it" for successful moves, and "that's wrong" for incorrect moves. When using the same commands in sequence, sometimes people left out the actual commands, and replaced them with words such as "again" or "keep going."
It is also noted, that each participant developed an unique language to talk to the robot. The design of a robot to understand humans should take this into consideration.
This weblog is dedicated to fresh and alternate views on robotics. We will focus especially in music robots, toy robots, play and game and robots as well as the culture of robots. We are the the first robot-blog from Germany - and maybe from Europe - that write regularly on this topic! This blog is made by the same people around the Digital Tools Magazine. We will have some nice surprises later this year, so stay tuned!
