Daniel Cernea

How can we explore the depths of our own planet? It’s not easy to inspect life in all its complexity and beauty when it’s miles and miles under the sea level. Still, we have other options for exploring our oceans and learning how to cherish this immeasurable treasure.

I particularly love the depth representation of the sea floor in the animation at the beginning of the talk. It truly gives you an impression of how minute the land masses really are compared to the vast volume of the oceans.

…especially if they maneuver like this.

Even if you haven’t, I think you might like this video. I already knew about the robotic shelves, but not about the dynamic weighted positioning in the warehouse. Pretty cool!

… but then again, it’s fascinating too.

Article here.

This reminds me of point clouds and meshes, LRFs and robotic environments.

Closeness defines interaction. Why? Because proxemics explains how the distance between people influence their level of comfort and behavior. What scientist are trying right now is to extrapolate these finding to other fields too, like HCI (video above) and Robotics.

Is your curtain too small to cover up your window? Do you feel you’re not getting enough privacy in-doors? Don’t despair! Simple use a small engine, some robotics, a bit of computer vision trickery and voila! Problem solved.

Lovely. Looks like one of the US autonomous car project I posted here some weeks ago. I wonder why everyone uses a VW Passat for this.

On the other hand, I bet the average speed of this cab is rubbish. But still, only by working and trying one can improve something.

UPDATE:
Well, well, well. It seems the people at Stanford taught this car how to slide-in park. I wonder if I could do as well as the computer…

They honestly do. Poking to see if you feel it, or, to be more precise, to see if it hurts you. It seems people are now considering ways for robots to detect the pain threshold of they masters. Interesting direction…