Most of us were introduced to Artificial Intelligence from the movies. We saw robots in movies like Chappie,Short Circuit, or Wall-e that could understand language, speak, and recognize what was around them. The good news is that these capabilities we saw in the movies are now finally realizable on robots. A Robot is an excellent platform for AI enthusiasts to learn from. For example there are many tutorials on how to demonstrate “Object Detection” from a picture. Like Microsoft’s article on object detection. They start off with a picture taken by a photographer. The picture was probably taken a few years previously. But detecting objects on a dated picture where the objects have probably moved or doesn’t exist in the current location is not particularly useful. But when one has a robot with a camera it changes the situation. Now when we handle object detection on a picture taken a few milliseconds previously then we are able to program the robot to react to what it sees. Perhaps we want our robot to speak to our pet when it comes into the room. Or maybe we want our robot to give out a shriek when the neighbor’s dog comes sniffing around on our lawn (you can imagine what might come next) . There are many other AI capabilities that we can add to our robot. We can place AI generated voices on our robot. Make our robot have a deep sounding voice. Or maybe we want it to sound like Dot Matrix in SpaceBalls. By the Way, There are many websites that can produce AI generated voices that are clones of a particular person. There are many wonderful and scary possibilities with this technology. Continuing on to what we can place on our robot. We can add Intents which would allow our robot to understand our verbal questions and commands( like Siri, Alexa, or other digital assistants). We can also add Sentiment Analysis to our robots so that the robot can determine if the emotional tone of our statements to the robot is positive, negative, or neutral. This would allow our robot to recognize if we are happy or sad. There are countless possibilties when we add AI to robots. What would you like to add?
