Robots Come to Their Senses via Evolution

By Geoff Duncan March 22, 2006

Robots Come to Their Senses via Evolution

Evolution Robotics has announced that it has entered into a strategic alliance with WowWee Robotics, whose Robosapian and Roboraptor consumer ‘bots are the best-selling consumer robots on the market today. Through the partnership, WowWee plans to incorporate two unique Evolution Technologies into its consumer robots: ViPR (Visual Pattern Recognition) and Northstar, a positional awareness system.

WowWee licensed Segway’s SmartMotion technology for its consumer robots in October 2005, promising SmartMotion-based products in 2006.

ViPR provides for fast recognition of visual patterns and objects, plus locational information in real world environments. ViPR technology can work in real time across a wide range of angles, distortion, and lighting conditions, and is capable of recognizing multiple objects simultaneously. On a 1.4GHz processor, ViPR can process 15 and more images per second at 208 by 160-pixel resolution, a level more than do-able at a consumer level with today’s technology. Northstar is a low-cost solution which provided positional and locational awareness. Northstar uses triangulation to measure position and heading in relation to invisible IR “light spots” a device projects onto a ceiling or other visible surface. Northstar is not computationally intensive, low-cost, updates ten times a second, and is accurate to a few centimeters in many situations.

“We are excited about joining WowWee to develop a new generation of robotic products that will provide amazing features to consumers,” said Paolo Pirjanian, Evolution’s President and CTO. “These new robots will be truly intelligent and autonomous

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Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

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