Intelligent Robotics and Embedded SystemsDr. Marek Perkowski and Dr. Douglas Hall

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mperkows/ http://www.ece.pdx.edu/People/Hall1.htm

Dr. Perkowski smiles at the Sonbi Robot Head from Hahoe Theatre.

Sonbi the Confucian Scholar smiles back. He can track you also with his eyes and head.

Building Interactive Robot Theatre using various human-robot interaction and advanced robot imitation methods is a long-term dream of Professor Marek Perkowski, director of Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Their works attempt to blend scientific theories, advanced computational intelligence programming and artistic insights to create robot actors for the theatre. Unlike current robot theatres that are fully programmed and have simplified robots or standard mobile robots, the Portland Cyber Theatre uses stationary and mobile robots that are humanoid and that improvise during their interactions with humans. Supported by grants from Intel, KOSEF and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, the group built the first version - KAIST Hahoe Robot Theatre. The masks of Sonbi – a Confucian Scholar, Yangban – a proud aristocrat, and Pune – his concubine, are familiar to Koreans and to everybody interested in history of theatre. Hahoe play is known in Korea since 13 century. Now these characters become animated actors, humanoid robots with human-like behaviors, gestures and reactions.

Selected Publications in Intelligent RoboticsT-W Wang, M. Sajkowski, T. Stenzel, M. Perkowski, "An Inexpensive Educational Platform to Teach Humanoid Robotics," Proc. ICEE conference, Gliwice, Poland, June 2005. M. Perkowski, T. Sasao, J-H Kim, M. Lukac, J. Allen, S. Gebauer, "Hahoe KAIST Robot Theatre: Learning Rules of Interactive Robot Behavior as a Multi-Valued Logic Synthesis Problem," Proceedings of the 35 th International Symposium on Multiple-Valued Logic, May 19-21, 2005, Calgary, Canada, 2005. S. Grygiel, M. Zwick, M. Perkowski, "Multi-level decomposition of probabilistic relations," Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics, Vol. 33, Number 5/6, pp. 948–961. ISSN 0368-492X, 2004. A. N. Al-Rabadi, M. Perkowski, M. Zwick, "A comparison of modified reconstructability analysis and Ashenhurst-Curtis decomposition of Boolean functions," Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems & Cybernetics, Vol. 33, Number 5/6, pp. 933-947, ISSN 0368-492X, 2004. P. Burkey, M. Perkowski, "Efficient Decomposition of Large Fuzzy Functions and Relations,'' Proceedings of International Conference on Fuzzy Information Processing, Theories and Applications, March 1-4, 2003, Beijing, China, Tsinghua University Press and Springer, pp. 145-154, 2003. M. Folgheraiter, G. Gini, M. Perkowski, M. Pivtoraiko, "Blackfingers: a Sophisticated Hand Prosthesis,'' Proceedings of ICORR 2003 (the 8th International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics), April 22-25, 2003, KAIST, Korea, pp. 238-241, 2003. M. Perkowski, T. Sasao, A. Iseno, U. Wong, M. Pivtoraiko, M. Folgheraiter, M. Lukac, D. Ng, M. Fix, K. Kuchs, "Use of Machine Learning based on Constructive Induction in Dialogs with Robotic Heads,'' Proceedings of ICORR 2003 (the 8th International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics), April 22-25, 2003, KAIST, Korea, pp. 326-329, 2003.

What is new?

It is well known that standard computer science models such as logic functions, fuzzy logic, finite state machines, decision diagrams, or neural nets are excessively used in robotics to model movement, learning, cognition and perception. The innovative component of our research is to generalize all these classical models to their corresponding quantum computational intelligence models. Our constructive induction method learns thus from examples not only Boolean circuits but also Quantum Circuits. The circuit learned from examples is the specification of certain robot behavior, it can be a motion or a way of language-guided synthesized speech and response. We hypothesize that the robot’s brain should be quantum and thus we analyze how best to use the concept of quantum mechanics to build its components. Thus we use theories of constructive induction, control and quantum learning which are both new and not used so far in the area of robotics.

The ultimate goal of the Portland Cyber Theatre is to develop the artistic concept of robot puppetry based on sound human-robot interaction principles and thus help to develop a general theory of human-robot interaction for future home robots that will become our life partners. For instance, we investigate methods to teach robots from examples and interaction, by imitation and by playing human-robot games. How can a certain expertise be transferred easily and flexibly from a human or a team of humans to a humanoid robot? We believe that future robots used in daily life, and especially for the disabled and elderly will need to address all or at least many of these issues in order to be not only accepted, but also be liked by their human owners.

We are inspired by scientific studies of human and animal behavior which demonstrate remarkably clever mechanisms of predicting behaviors of others and ways to learn through interaction. We try to incorporate these mechanisms in our robots not only for entertainment purposes or ways of interacting with future humanoid robots but also in an attempt to understand better the humans way of learning and communicating. Sonbi can think: “Is Marek smiling?”, “how is he smiling?”, “why he is smiling when he tells me that he likes me?” These are difficult questions for a human, but even more so for a robot that is using Hidden Markov Model based face recognition combined with Constructive Induction pattern recognition method.

Inside the head

To reach the above long-term goals, our research concentrates on several separate issues such as mechanical design of robots, new sensing and actuating technologies, robot vision, natural language based conversation and interaction, gesture, body language and facial gesture recognition, design of expressive theatrical and emotional movements and automatic learning/creating of them, cognitive modeling, human-robot interaction and robot imitation, art of animating movies and puppets, machine learning, evolutionary hardware, quantum circuits synthesis for robot behaviors, game theory and quantum games. Our research is thus very multi-disciplinary and we collaborate with groups at PSU and worldwide on particular narrower topics.

Selected Publications in Embedded SystemsD. V. Hall, Microprocessor System Design- Hardware, Programming, and Interfacing, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2006.C. H. Lee, M. A. Perkowski, D. V. Hall, D. S. Jun, "Self-Repairable EPLDs II: Advanced Self-Repairing Methodology," 2001 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, 2001.C. H. Lee, D. V. Hall, M. A. Perkowski, D. S. Jun, "Self-Repairable GALs," Journal of Systems Architecture, 2001.C. H. Lee, M. A. Perkowski, D. V. Hall, D. S. Jun, "Self-Repairable EPLDs: Design, Self-Repair, and Evaluation Methodology," Second NASA/DoD Workshop on Evolvable Hardware, 2000.

Robot Theatre as a Metaphore for robot-human interaction and Robot Theatre as a Metaphore for robot-human interaction and learning.learning.

Our robots include robot arms, large humanoid robots, walking hexapod, quadruped and biped (humanoid) robots, robot heads (research of Dr. Perkowski) and robotized wheelchairs (research of Dr. Hall).

Dr. Hall