The lab’s best friend poses with fifty of the thousand objects he can now recognise thanks to grid computing. Image courtesy of Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam

This demonstration of color-based object recognition by a grid-connected robot dog will be on show at SC07 in Reno, Nevada, next month. What will they think of next?

A team from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is teaching an AIBO dog new tricks, using the popular robot toy to showcase the value of grids in multimedia computing.

The team have connected their robo-pooch to a wide-area grid system—encompassing computers at institutes in Europe, the United States and Australia—and are using these resources to teach color-based object recognition.

The robot can now identify 1000 different objects, even under a diversity of imaging conditions, such as different shadowing and color variations. Interestingly, based on an experiment once published in Nature, this is far beyond the object learning and recognition capacity as reported for real dogs.

If you have more time, take a look at the project’s promotional video, which won the “most visionary research” award at the AAAI-07 conference in Vancouver, Canada, and gained an “honourable mention” at the annual Dutch meeting between science and press, called Bessensap 2007.

The site also includes a short movie in which the AIBO Object Recognition GUI is used to perform the “learning” phase while connected to five cluster computers: four in Europe and one in Australia. 

In addition to computing resources from Vrije Universiteit and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, the grid includes resources at: Monash University, the Australian Centre for Advanced Computing and Communications, the University of Sydney and CSIRO in Australia; the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, the University of Illinois and the San Diego Supercomputer Center in the U.S.; Salzburg University, Munich Technical University, the University of Genoa, Krakow University of Science and Technology , the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, the Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria and Oxford University in Europe.