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Artificial intelligence archive

Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists

Microsoft’s Kinect, a motion-tracking peripheral for the Xbox console that is packed with an irresistible blend of cameras and sensors, is finding popularity among researchers such as UC Berkeley engineering graduate student Patrick Bouffard. Working out of Professor Claire Tomlin’s lab, Bouffard built a Kinect-enhanced robotic helicopter that perceives objects in its path. A video of the device has been a viral hit on YouTube.

Berkeley Engineering grad student uses Kinect to create flying AI robot

EECS grad student Patrick Bouffard, working with Professor Claire Tomlin from the Hybrid Systems Lab, has used Microsoft’s Kinect controller to create a quadcopter which can maneuver around obstacles autonomously. The developers attached the Kinect hardware to the device which delivers a point cloud to the on-board computer and allows the vehicle to map its surroundings and move about intelligently. A video documenting the project and posted on YouTube is on track for going viral.

Bionic legs allow paraplegics to get up and walk

A robotic exoskeleton called eLEGS enables people who have been paralyzed below the waist to walk again. The technology, the latest in a line of “human augmentation robotics systems” that Berkeley Bionics has created with the Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, is geared toward consumers — the 6 million or so paraplegics in the U.S. who are bound to wheelchairs.

Researchers empower robot to fold towels

Who wouldn’t want a robot that could make your bed or do the laundry? A team of Berkeley researchers has brought us one important step closer by, for the first time, enabling an autonomous robot to reliably fold piles of previously unseen towels. Robots that can do things like assembling cars have been around for decades. The towel-folding robot, however, is doing something very new, according to the researchers, doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and assistant professor Pieter Abbeel, both of UC Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

A search giant

It’s no surprise that a Google search for Peter Norvig turns up tens of thousands of hits. Norvig (Ph.D. ’86 EECS) literally wrote the book on artificial intelligence, coauthoring a bestselling textbook on the subject with Professor Stuart Russell in 1995. As the senior computer scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, he led the team that developed the remote artificial intelligence software that flew aboard the Deep Space 1 spacecraft in 1999. And today, as Google’s director of research, Norvig is transforming the way information is organized and accessed on the Web.