Spring Break
Drexel, Korea collaborate
Nathan Fried
Issue date: 6/5/09 Section: News
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Paul Oh, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, is currently leading a five-year National Science Foundation funded collaboration between U.S. universities and robotic institutes in Korea. His plan is to make the U.S. and Drexel a leader in humanoid research.
"The rest of the world is surpassing the U.S. in the area of humanoid robots. The U.S. is far, far behind," Oh said.
While the U.S. may be the most advanced in the development of Artificial Intelligence, we are severely lacking any leadership role in the world when it comes to creating humanoids, robots that resemble the human body, Oh said. These human-like robots are important for the field of robotics as they possess an ability to perform and interact much like humans do with the world. Current U.S. robots, such as the vacuum-cleaning Roomba, come with a strict reliance on custom interfaces and have a number of operating restrictions. This can make non-humanoid robots very limited in their usefulness.
"The point with humanoid robots is that it doesn't need custom interfaces," Rob Ellenberg, a graduate student in Oh's lab, said. "So essentially, humanoid robots are backwards compatible with [things] we use on a daily basis. You can imagine the recyclability of interfaces."
However, Asia has proved to be incredibly innovative with their development of humanoids. HUBO for example, developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, possesses a wide range of mobility, voice recognition and synthesis, and sophisticated vision. HUBO is considered second to only the more popular Asimo, created by the Japanese company Honda.
"Asimo, mechanically is not as fast as [HUBO] but it is a very solid platform and the AI and control is fantastic," Daniel Lafaro, a graduate student in Oh's lab, said. "They are way further than U.S. but after this five year program, we hope to be similar to Asimo in the AI abilities because we are working with many universities on this one platform."
Ellenberg said they are trying to get all the software knowledge on one side in America combine with the hardware expertise in Korea, which is the recipe to compete with Asimo.
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