David Hanson (robotics designer)
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David Hanson is an American robotics designer and researcher, best known as the creator of a series highly realistic humanoid robots.
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[edit] Biography
Hanson was educated as a designer and artist. In 1996, Hanson received a BFA in film/animation/video (FAV) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). While a student at RISD, Hanson tinkered with robotics and AI, in independent studies and classes at Brown University. Hanson received some notoriety during this time for the "Primordial Ooze Bath", a 70' x 40' pit of carageenan sludge, in which hundreds of Brown and RISD students frolicked. After RISD, Hanson worked as a sculptor for Kern Sculpture Company in New Orleans contracting for Universal Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering. In 1997, Hanson contracted for Sun International, sculpting figures for the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas. In 1998, Hanson went to North Hollywood, California, to work as a sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering. In 1999, Hanson moved into Disney's Technical Development, where he headed several robotic and materials projects. In spring 2001, Hanson left Disney and constructed a two-man art show (with David Deaney), involving functioning hot-tubs and titled "Gymnosophore". Hanson began work on a Ph.D. at the UTD in the spring of 2002.
Hanson married Amanda Catherine Fisher on February 12, 2006. They have one child, Zeno.
[edit] Work
In 2005, Hanson demonstrated within the world's "first expressive walking humanoid," in collaboration with the KAIST Hubo group. At the June 2005 WIRED Nextfest in Chicago, Hanson attached his Eva robot to the walking Hubo robot body. While the "Eva-Hubo" robot only took a few steps and made a few facial expressions, Hanson claims that it nevertheless represents the historical first robotic emulation of a full human being.
In October 2005, Hanson developed a robotic bust of Einstein, delivered to the Hubo lab at KAIST in Daejeon, Korea in November 2005. There Hanson and the Hubo team attached the bust of Einstein to a specially-decorated Hubo body, which was dubbed "Albert Hubo." It was demonstrated at the APEC political summit in Busan, Korea on November 17, 2005.
In addition to hardware development, Hanson and his company (Hanson Robotics Inc) develop "conversational personnas." Hanson's robots use speech recognition software, natural language processing, computer vision, and Hanson's own AI systems for responsive animations and 3D spatial reasoning and sensory fusion [Hanson et al, 2004, 2005, 2006]. Early instances of this work was shown first at the 2002 AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada [Hanson, 2002] and at the AAAS annual meeting in Denver, Colorado [Hanson et al, 2003]. In 2005 Hanson and team received a AAAI award for their "intelligent conversational portrait" of Philip K Dick [AI Magazine, fall 2005]. First shown at the 2005 Nextfest, the robot incorporated thousands of pages of the writings of PKD including journals and letters, into an LSA corpus and conversational system constructed by Andrew Olney of the University of Memphis. Additional conversational design for the PKD-android was provided by Steve Aydt and Hanson [Hanson et al, 2005].
The software for Hanson robots is designed to imitate the flow of a face-to face conversational interaction—a dynamic HRI calls the "humanlike computer interface" [WIRED 2005]. In a typical interaction, cameras in the robot's eyes feed computer vision algorithms (including several from Intel Open CV) to see human faces and track them. This data is used by the motion control to servo the head to affect eye contact with a person. Meanwhile, faces are learned and recognized using biometric identification, typically Cognitec FaceVacs. This allows the robot to remember an interlocutor, discuss previous interactions, and learn new faces. If a face is recognized, the robot may vocalize a warm greeting. However, if the previous interactions were negative, the robot likely will be cold and unfriendly in response.
In the K-Bot robot shown at the 2003 AAAS annual meeting, the computer vision included Nevenvision's facial-feature tracking, which allowed K-bot to see and mimic facial expressions. In the Jules robot shown at 2006 WIRED Nextfest, the interpreted vision data was assembled into a 3D world model, and correlated with the natural language database.
Hanson has also created "robotic humanoid sculptures" named K-Bot, Vera, and Eva (now at the University of the West of England (UWE), in Bristol). Hanson's latest robot, the androgynous android (or "androgynoid") Jules, also now resides at UWE, for use in cognitive science research and AI development. Jules was commissioned by the UWE with a statistically perfect androgynous face.
As a University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate from 2002 to the present, Hanson has developed 13 humanoid robots, and several dozen "robotic artworks," handling the sculpture, moldmaking, systems design, and material science research aspects of construction himself. In 2003, Hanson created a commercial venture, now called Hanson Robotics Inc (HRI), to deliver robots for useful applications like education and scientific research.
[edit] Publications
- (with Olney, A, Zielke, M, Pereira, A.) (2005). Upending the uncanny valley, in AAAI conference proceedings.
- “Expanding the Design Domain of Humanoid Robots”, Proc. ICCS CogSci Conference, special session on Android Science, Vancouver, 2006.
- (with Jun-Ho O, Han I. Y., Kim J. K., Kim, W. S., Park, I.W.) “Design of Android type Humanoid Robot Albert HUBO”, Proc. IEEE/RJS IROS Robotics Conference, Beijing, 2006.
- “Expanding the Aesthetics Possibilities for Humanlike Robots”, Proc. IEEE Humanoid Robotics Conference, special session on the Uncanny Valley; Tskuba, Japan, December 2005.
- (with Olney A., Prilliman S., Mathews E., Zielke M., Hammons D., Fernandez R., Stephanou H.), “Upending the Uncanny Valley”, Proc. AAAI’s National Conference, Pittsburgh, 2005.
- (with White V.) “Converging the Capabilities of ElectroActive Polymer Artificial Muscles and the Requirements of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 10TH Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2004.
- (with Rus D., Canvin S., Scmeirer G.) “Applications of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Ch.10 of Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots. Bar-Cohen, Y and Breazeal, C. (Ed.) SPIE Press, May 2003.
- "EAP Actuator Design for Biologically-inspired Face-Based Communication Robots". Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 9th Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2003.
- “Bio-inspired Facisal Expression Interface for Emotive Robots”, Proc. AAAI National Conference in Edmonton, CA, 2002.
