Philipp Kern

The BSP is hosted in rooms of the ETH Zürich, more precisely the Artificial Intelligence labs of the Institute for Computer Science. Thanks to Gürkan, our host and with whom I am staying here, we got a tour through the labs. Most experiments were offline, but there were some left.

This experiment was adaptive running on a conveyor belt. The virtual "dog" looks for algorithms which copes with the belt running in the opposite direction. It uses some infrared sensors to measure the distance to the wall in front of it.

A close-up shot of the robot, with ultrasonic distance measurement. It has passive and active joints and tries heuristically to cope with them.

A fish which works autonomically in the water, to swim around in the aquarium.

That humanoid robot head is developped collaboratively across Europe I was told. This explains why it resembled much the head of a robot I saw in Karlsruhe, in their robotics labs.

Actually they said that most of the experiments were very old. But they are still looking interesting. Some are using neural nets, like an artificial arm for people who have lost a hand, but they told us that it's not very practical because of the noise of the sensors.

Other curiosita: the cheapest 3D printer they have found (~20k euros), which creates 3D structures in plastic (we saw some of the results) and an adapted tuxracer (which we were not able to see in action, because of a missing laptop), with a force feedback and controlling chair.

And yes, we are still squashing bugs... it's fun, actually.