Matias and the Kondo KHR-1

On Friday the 15th, I attended the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory's seminar at 4 pm in the ECE conference room in FAB. A professor from Korea was there who is at PSU to learn from Prof Perkowski's methods. There were also two non-regulars, Mr Opsahi and Glen, who are retired, but still devoted to research and into engineering, computer science, and system science based areas from what I gathered. Also in attendance were the rest of Prof Perkowski's Masters and PhD students, Dmitiry, two I don't know, and Martin who works on emotional robots. Matias gave a presentation on his proposed thesis work. He is interested gesture as it is articulated through animation. The test platform for his software applications will be the Kondo KHR - 1 pictured to the right. Topics discussed included Lasseter animation theory, Laban Motion Analysis, the merits of stereo vision, and the possibility of using quaternion to represent joint movements. We also took a pole to see if people preferred humanoid robots, or ones that look more like muppets. Results seemed to point to the fact that it depends on the application, but also that some of us were weary of the replicants.