General

• How to reach the Lab?
• News
• The past
• Photos and movies
• Links to resources


• Main page
• Internal Web

Education

• Courses 2004-2005
• Stage- en Thesisvoorstellen (2004-2005)

Research

• Origins of Language
• Current projects
• Publications

Members

• Prof. Dr. Luc Steels
• Joris Bleys
• Joachim de Beule
• Bart De Vylder
• Bart Jansen
• Joris Van Looveren

Former members

• Dr. Tony Belpaeme
• Dr. Bart de Boer
• Dr. Tom Lenaerts
• Jelle Zuidema
• Carlos Ruben de la Mora
• Others

Photographic Material

This photographic and video material is copyrighted by the VUB Artificial Intelligence Lab, permission for reproduction should be attained from the VUB AI-lab or one of its members.

Picture collections

• Historical robots of the VUB AI Lab.
• European Conference for Artificial Life (1997), series 1.
• European Conference for Artificial Life (1997), series 2.
• The 1997 robot base.
• The 1998 Robocup competition, the VUB AI Lab team.
• The 1998 Robocup event in Paris.
• Miscellaneous robot snaps.
• Talking Heads prototyping at the AI Lab.
• The European Robocup Competition 2000 in Amsterdam.
• The Roboguard.

Movies

• Detecting and tracking humans and understanding their desire to interact (AVI, 115Mb).
  This video shows an experimental setup to study a component of a cognitive robot for detecting and tracking humans and for reading their willingness to interact. The aim of these setup and the related experiments is to build a system which enables a robot to reliably detect and track humans using multiple visual cues, such as chromatic data, depth, motion and facial features. On top of the tracking mechanism, a number of heuristics report on the willingness of the user to interact with the robot. The system has been designed to be robust to different lighting conditions, it can handle different poses of the user, it is robust to the distance that the user maintains to the robot and can handle multiple users simultaneously. This last feature is implemented as an attention mechanism, where the robot keeps its attention with one interested user without being distracted by others or other distractions. The setup consists of a stereo colour camera mounted on a pan/tilt head and runs off a laptop computer, insuring is portability.
   
• Ecosystem experiment 1 (Quicktime, 21Mb).
  A robot performing touch based obstacle avoidance using a behaviour based control architecture.
   
• Ecosystem experiment 2 (Quicktime, 26Mb).
  A robot working in the ecosystem of the VUB AI lab. The grey boxes are "parasites" in the environment which consume energy of the total amount of energy present in the ecosystem. A robot can temporarily stun a parasite by bumping into it. A stunned parasite does not consume energy, leaving more for the robot.
   
• Ecosystem experiment 3 (Quicktime, 24Mb).
  A full-scale experiment with three robots, three parasites (grey boxes) and a charging station. Both parasites and robots consume energy, but the robots can increase their amount of available energy by stunning the parasites. The ecosystem energy is limited, so robots are forced to help eachother stun the parasites. This ecological constraint forces the robots the exhibit altruistic behaviour.
  

• Dancing robots (AVI, 7.8Mb, MPG, 11MB)
  This is the ritual that two ``language game'' robots perform before playing a language game. They do this to scan the environment, and get to know the context before starting to interact linguistically.

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