Industry | Humanoid robots |
---|---|
Founded | 2004 |
Founder | Will Jackson |
Headquarters | , England |
Website | engineeredarts |
Engineered Arts Ltd is an English engineering, designer and manufacturer of humanoid robots based in Cornwall, England. It was founded in October 2004 by Will Jackson. [1]
The company was founded by Will Jackson in 2004. While working on exhibitions for London's Science Museum in the 1990s, Jackson came upon the need for a machine that could explain concepts and ideas to people repetitively in an entertaining way and not to be nervous when talking to a group of people. In 2005, Jackson's work on the "Mechanical Theater" for The Eden Project would produce the company's first humanoid robot, RoboThespian Mark 1. [2]
The company's early work included, creative and science education projects for Kew Gardens in London, Glasgow Science Centre in Scotland and other non-robot work. After completing the installation of a robot theatre at Copernicus Science Centre in 2010 the decision was made to focus solely on robot hardware and software.
Ameca is a humanoid robot designed as a platform for Artificial Intelligence research and human interaction applications. It was launched at CES in Las Vegas USA in January 2022. [3] Its main focus on human-like expressions and range of facial movement. [4] In its demonstration, it was made to mimic an operator's face using a mobile phone that had built-in LIDAR and used Apple's ARKit tools. [5] [6]
Mesmer is a humanoid robot. Its key design feature is its face covered by a skin-like rubber, that can exhibit human-like expressions and characteristics. It was created and manufactured using 3D scans of human models taken in-house, allowing Engineered Arts to accurately mimic human bone form, skin texture, and emotions. [7]
RoboThespian is an interactive, animatronic humanoid robot [8] with LCD screens for eyes, [9] powered by Pneumatic motors, it and speaks more than 30 languages, and can be found on public display worldwide. [10]
It is 1.75 metres (5 ft 9 in) tall, weighs in at 33 kilograms (73 lb), sports an aluminium chassis and a body shell made of polyethylene terephthalate plastic and its body offers over 30 axes of movement.
Internally it uses a Parallax processor for motor control. [11]
Over fifty are currently permanently installed worldwide, [12] including:
Academic institutions, including:
Socibot was a static torso with a projected face. It integrated the core technologies of RoboThespian but in a desktop- or kiosk-sized form-factor. [17] with a projected computer-generated face and articulated neck a simple and affordable introduction to advanced robotics. [18]
This robot has been sold to places such as: [19]
Public installations:
Academic institutions, including:
Ai-Da is a humanoid robot based on the Robothespian platform. Completed in 2019, Ai-Da contains no conversational AI capabilities and is tele-operated using Engineered Arts Tin Man software. Its core function is creating drawings, paintings, and sculptures, with the use of a bionic hand and ocular cameras. [20] She is named after Ada Lovelace.
A variation on the standard Mesmer, this robot was modelled after 11th President of India, Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam for display at Military Might, Chandrapur, Maharashtra.
Fred was created as part of the PR campaign to promote the TV series Westworld . [21] The robot employed Tin-Man technology to interact with customers in a London pub.
Rather than use an "off the shelf" operating system such as ROS, Engineered Arts uses its own OS called "Tritium". [22] It is designed to make their robots easy to program by non-technical people and operated from any location.
Tinman a telepresence program that allows a robot's owners to communicate with an audience via the robot's "personality", while themselves being remote. [23]
IOServe provides a generic way to link and program all robot hardware and runs under Linux. It has the ability to capture motion data and replay it and modify existing motion sequences on the fly, including an interface to the open source 3D program Blender. [11]
An android is a humanoid robot or other artificial being often made from a flesh-like material. Historically, androids existed only in the domain of science fiction and were frequently seen in film and television, but advances in robot technology have allowed the design of functional and realistic humanoid robots.
A humanoid robot is a robot resembling the human body in shape. The design may be for functional purposes, such as interacting with human tools and environments, for experimental purposes, such as the study of bipedal locomotion, or for other purposes. In general, humanoid robots have a torso, a head, two arms, and two legs, though some humanoid robots may replicate only part of the body. Androids are humanoid robots built to aesthetically resemble humans.
Cog was a project at the Humanoid Robotics Group of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was based on the hypothesis that human-level intelligence requires gaining experience from interacting with humans, like human infants do. This in turn required many interactions with humans over a long period. Because Cog's behavior responded to what humans would consider appropriate and socially salient environmental stimuli, the robot was expected to act more human. This behavior also provided the robot with a better context for deciphering and imitating human behavior. This was intended to allow the robot to learn socially, as humans do.
RoboCup is an annual international robotics competition founded in 1996 by a group of university professors. The aim of the competition is to promote robotics and AI research by offering a publicly appealing – but formidable – challenge.
The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. Examples of the phenomenon exist among robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies has propagated discussions and citations of the "valley"; such conversation has enhanced the construct's verisimilitude. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting eerie feelings in viewers.
ASIMO is a humanoid robot created by Honda in 2000. It is displayed in the Miraikan museum in Tokyo, Japan. On 8 July 2018, Honda posted the last update of Asimo on their official page stating that it would be ceasing all development and production of Asimo robots in order to focus on more practical applications using the technology developed through Asimo's lifespan. It made its last active appearance in March 2022, over 20 years after its first, as Honda announced that they are retiring the robot to concentrate on remote-controlled, avatar-style, robotic technology.
David Hanson Jr. is an American roboticist who is the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Hanson Robotics, a Hong Kong-based robotics company founded in 2013.
iCub is a one meter tall open source robotics humanoid robot testbed for research into human cognition and artificial intelligence.
RoboGames is an annual robot contest held in San Mateo, California. The last RoboGames was held April 6-9, 2023 in Pleasanton, California, having been on hiatus since the previous event in April 2018.
Peter Nordin was a Swedish computer scientist, entrepreneur and author who has contributed to artificial intelligence, automatic programming, machine learning, and evolutionary robotics.
Nao is an autonomous, programmable humanoid robot formerly developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French robotics company headquartered in Paris, which was acquired by SoftBank Group in 2015 and rebranded as SoftBank Robotics. The robot's development began with the launch of Project Nao in 2004. On 15 August 2007, Nao replaced Sony's robot dog Aibo as the robot used in the RoboCup Standard Platform League (SPL), an international robot soccer competition. The Nao was used in RoboCup 2008 and 2009, and the NaoV3R was chosen as the platform for the SPL at RoboCup 2010.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to robotics:
The RoboCup 3D Simulated Soccer League allows software agents to control humanoid robots to compete against one another in a realistic simulation of the rules and physics of a game of soccer. The platform strives to reproduce the software programming challenges faced when building real physical robots for this purpose. In doing so, it helps research towards the RoboCup Federation's goal of developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team in 2050.
Roboy is an advanced humanoid robot that was developed at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich, and was publicly presented on March 8, 2013. Originally designed to emulate humans with the future possibility of helping out in daily environments, Roboy is a project that has involved both engineers and scientists. Initiated in 2012 by Pascal Kaufmann, Roboy is the work of engineers who designed him according to design principles developed by Prof. Dr. Rolf Pfeifer, the AI lab director, in conjunction with the assistance of other development partners. Both the team members and the partners of the Roboy project share a commitment toward continued research in the area of soft robotics. Later Roboy was moved to Munich, Germany, where Rafael Hostettler conducts research on it at the Technical University. Since July 2020, Roboy is located back in Zurich, Switzerland in the offices of the Mindfire Foundation.
Sophia is a female social humanoid robot developed in 2016 by the Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. Sophia was activated on February 14, 2016, and made her first public appearance in mid-March 2016 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, United States. Sophia was marketed as a "social robot" who can mimic social behavior and induce feelings of love in humans.
Hanson Robotics Limited is a Hong Kong-based engineering and robotics company founded by David Hanson, known for its development of human-like robots with artificial intelligence (AI) for consumer, entertainment, service, healthcare, and research applications. The robots include Albert HUBO, the first walking robot with human-like expressions; BINA48, an interactive humanoid robot bust; and Sophia, the world's first robot citizen. The company has 45 employees.
Ribo is the first social humanoid robot which can speak in Bengali. Ribo was created by RoboSUST, a robotics group of Shahjalal University of Science & Technology, Bangladesh. The team was supervised by Muhammed Zafar Iqbal. Bangladesh Science Fiction Society funded for making this humanoid robot Ribo. Ribo was first appeared in public on 11 December 2015 in a Science Fiction Festival held at the Public Library, Shahbag.
Ai-Da is described by its creator as "the world's first ultra-realistic humanoid robot" artist. Completed in 2019, Ai-Da is an artificial intelligence robot that makes drawings, painting, and sculptures. It is named after Ada Lovelace The robot gained international attention when it was able to draw people from sight with a pencil using her bionic hand and cameras in her eyes.
Robotics is a recent developing technology in Ethiopia and many high tech enterprises are emerging in Ethiopia, implementing artificial intelligence to erase manufacturing jobs.
Ameca is a female robotic humanoid created in 2021 by Engineered Arts.