As you may remember, my project received a lot of attention last year. Although I have since moved onto other projects as well, I continue to work with robots that aim to act more appropriately around people.

Robovie is one of the many robots being shown and discussed here.

You may remember these guys from my pictures of last year’s Japan visit. They made an appearance again here. These robots are quite expensive as I found out after last year, at over $25,000 each!

An optional bus tour was offered as part of the conference. One part of the tour took us to a grocery store where this robot was demonstrated as a shopping assistant. The robot helped guide an elderly woman through the entrance of the store.

This is me with the famous Ishiguro android. Although it can be very hard to tell, I am the only actual person in this photo. I am looking towards the robot which has been designed almost exactly like its creator.

This concludes my Japan 2010 blog posts. More updates coming soon, including a few photos from my quick stop in San Francisco on the way back from Japan.

iPhone

After months of singing the praises of my BlackBerry, I got rid of it and moved to an iPhone. This was an expensive procedure because I am still on a contract with Telus, but selling my old phone and iPod touch helped offset the cost. For me, it’s a much better device that I am happy with. I really wish I could be happy with a BlackBerry for the wide variety of uses I get out of my iPhone, but the manufacturer just doesn’t want to put enough effort into developing the software properly.

Saint John Politics

I am back in Saint John visiting my family for a couple weeks. A few things have changed, but not much, as always. City debates continue to spur over the new Peel Plaza complex, which currently includes a plan to ruin a historic Carnegie Arts Centre building by burying the lower windows so that a tunnel for transporting prisoners can be built. Umm, what?

Academia & Robots

The main reason for my lack of time lately is the amount of work I’ve been putting into my school work. I’m working on a new robot that interacts with people in different ways, though not quite on the level of reading emotions as I previously explored. I did extensive development with my robot, now named PAUL-E, and am now working on a couple submissions to two upcoming conferences, so more travel may not be far away.

New Cell Phone Network

Say what you want about the Canadian cellphone industry, something done right has seemingly accomplished by 2 of the big 3, Telus and Bell. They have launched a new 3rd generation high-speed cellular network which enables them to offer phones that don’t suck, like the iPhone. Rogers offers a similar, compatible network, but it’s only fast in the main cities, whereas Bell and Telus created their network to be the same speed across pretty much most of the country. So far, my experience has been decent, with a few bugs that I hope they work out soon. This network was actually launched several months in advance ahead of the Olympics.

In the United States, people regularly complain about AT&T’s cell service which is the only company officially offering the iPhone in that country. Dropped calls and defaulting to the slower speed network is a regular occurrence in many large cities. Hopefully our networks will continue to be expansive with prices falling more due to increased competition.

That’s all for now. I hope to update my blog more often.

From the CBC web site:

Paul Saulnier is originally from Millidgeville and is now living in Calgary working on his masters degree in computer science.

Listen (7 minutes): MP3 – RealPlayer

Last week, my interview with Dr. Saul Greenberg (who coordinated with my supervisor and myself on this project) was broadcast nationwide on CBC Spark.

Various news sites from around the world spread the word in other languages.

In German!

In Japanese!

In Dutch! And a few more.

I was also contacted for individual interviews for the web sites of Wired and Wired UK.

In British English!

The Telegraph-Journal from my hometown also ran a story on the front page of their weekly Innovate section, with a very large colour photo.

My colleagues in the lab were quite amused as they saw me on the floor for this shot. The carpet, thankfully, was very clean. The Roomba in this photo actually has had its vacuum parts removed, so it’s not responsible for the cleanliness. Is a Roomba still a Roomba if it cannot vacuum?

Overall, this media attention has been a wild ride beyond my craziest expectations. I am very happy for the support this idea has received. You can view my complete project page on my web site.

Last week, I was contacted by Mike Yawney from Citytv Calgary. He was interested in doing a story about my Stress Roomba project. He had read about it on Engadget and was convinced it would make a fantastic story.

He came to the Interactions Lab on Wednesday with his cameraman, Nick. For an hour and half, I demonstrated my project and we played with my Roomba.

In this photo, you can see me helping out Mike with the headband as he tries it on. Although there were various malfunctions, it only took a few minutes for the system to start working for him on camera.

The next day, I got a call asking me if I want to appear on Breakfast Television the next morning to answer questions about the project. I agreed. So on Friday morning, I got up at the early hour of 5 AM, got ready and headed downtown.

Little did I know, I got off at the new 6th Street station which had just open for the first time only hours before. The City is redoing their downtown stations to accomodate larger cars.

I am sitting on the set of BT in this photo! I regret not asking to keep the mug, though they probably don’t give them away anyway. I got a mug now!

Basically, they showed Mike’s segment on BT and then asked me some questions.

You can see the whole Breakfast Television segment here and also just the pre-recorded news segment here. The photos in this post are courtesy and copyright of Citytv.

Sure enough, there was my face on The Raw Feed. This was my project. It gets better, because there was more!

A link from this article lead me to MIT’s Information Review blog, which published a review of my project last Friday.

How did this happen? Last week, I attended the HRI 2009 Conference in San Diego, California where I presented my previously blogged first academic publication as a poster. Things went well at the conference! Don’t worry, pictures are coming soon from San Francisco, where I went for a few days before San Diego.

Now I was curious if there was any other coverage of my little Roomba project, so I searched around. I found myself on the front page of BotJunkie as well, a robot blog, with an amusing headline.

Later in the day, my project made its way onto Gizmodo, a rather popular blog that I read from time to time, with another rather amusing headline. The comments are also quite good.

As you can imagine, I’m quite excited at the response that my project received. Now I realize it might actually be my mood which causes my Roomba to develop an attitude and refuse to return to its home base, instead hiding out in the most remote place it can find.

UPDATE: My project has now also appeared on Ubergizmo, this time with a bit more mellow headline.

Based on Alexa and Technorati ratings, both Gizmodo and Ubergizmo are two of the most popular gadget blogs around.

UPDATE 2: My project has just appeared on Engadget. Woohoo! This article sheds light on my little comic.

For the first 4 months, I did some interesting work. I used the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator to read brain waves muscle tension. Although some reviewers and my initial perceptions of this device led me to think I could use it for thought-based control, the reality was very different. At any rate, I was able to use input from this device to control an iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Above appears the first page of 2 of my academic paper.

Speaking of academic publications, I am expecting to appear in a publication of a different kind. The UNB Saint John Computer Science is apparently going to use a picture of me in Europe in an upcoming brochure along with my testimonial about the Student Abroad program! I’ll update when I know more about this.