Rolf Pfeiffer And His Team Working On Crowd Funded, Open-Source Humanoid Robot

 Robotics

Building on the work done for the ECCEROBOT, Dr. Rolf Pfeifer and his colleagues at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland have introduced Roboy, a crowd funded robot that incorporates the latest design principles of embodied artificial intelligence.

As director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich, Dr. Rolf Pfeifer has long argued that embodiment is one of the best methods for attaining artificial general intelligence (AGI). 

The embodiment hypothesis, is based on the idea that human intelligence is largely derived from our motor abilities, and therefore to create artificial general intelligence, a robotic body that interacts with the physical environment is crucial.

Previously Pfeifer worked to this end via the humanoid robot ECCEROBOT,  that was also referred to as Cronos. 

Now Pfeifer and his team of of researchers, have stated the ambitious goal of building a new humanoid robot, Roboy, in a record nine months.

To speed up decisions and cut down on development time, Roboy will be financed with private funds and constructed by private companies. This means that Roboy will be financed by exclusive sponsors and through crowd funding via the website http://roboy.org. In return for a contribution, every supporter will have his name or logo engraved on ROBOY and will receive another token of appreciation.

Development of Roboy will be conducted Open Source. This means that all expertise, ideas and inventions will not belong to a specific partner exclusively and every one will have the right to advance the robot's technologies. As seen in the image above, even how the robot looks is being decided with open crowd sourcing.  (The face improvements are great - the previous version was a bit too scary!)  

The researchers hope Roboy will be the ideal research platform for pioneering research in robotics and will be advanced even further at the AI Lab and other leading research institutions.

To find out more and support Roboy, check out the Roboy website, or the team's Facebook page.




SOURCE  Roboy Junior, Roboy.org

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