WALKING HEAD ROBOT – Tablet PC Robotics?

I just had to include this one as we see so many varied and new health care robotics, but not sure I want to see this guy walking around the hospital any time soon, but the technology built in is pretty wild and is work in progress, we can go from talking heads to walking heads. Take a close look here and the brains of the unit appear to be a Tablet PC, and sure looks like the i440D from TabletKiosk at the controls, so perhaps this is another use for a Tablet, build a robot, but again I would not necessarily welcome this robot coming to deliver medication yet at bedside in the hospital, but once dressed up a bit with, it may not look so bad! BD

The WALKING HEAD is a 2 m diameter 6-legged autonomous walking robot. Vertically mounted on its chassis is an LCD screen imaging a computer generated human-like head. The LCD screen can rotate from side to side. The robot has a scanning ultra-sound sensor that detects the presence of a person in front of it. It sits still until someone comes into the gallery space- then it stands, selects from a set of movements from its library of pre-programmed motions and performs the choreography. It then stops and waits until it detects someone else. The robot performs on a 4 m diameter platform and its tilt sensor system detects when it is close to the edge and backs off, walking in another direction. The Walking Head robot will become an actual-virtual system in that its mechanical leg motions will actuate its facial behaviors of nods, turns, tilts blinks and its vocalizations. Other possibilities include the robot being driven by its web-based 3D model with a menu of motion icons that can be pasted together and played. The robot is pneumatically actuated. The WALKING HEAD is a work in progress.