David Grunberg
Graduate Student
College of Engineering – Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering
International Conference on Humanoid
Robots
I attended the International Conference
on Humanoid Robots in Osaka, Japan. By
attending this conference, I was able to
present my work on enabling robots to
understand and respond to musical
emotion to numerous other experts in the
humanoid robotics field. I was also able to see what researchers from around the world were
working on. Additionally, I traveled through Eastern Asia and visited four other major research
institutions and universities, taking advantage of the opportunity to present my work to
researchers from all over the region.
While at the Humanoids Conference, I was able to attend a variety of other lectures and
workshops to extend my knowledge of the robotics field. Some of these directly tied into
robotics work I do at Drexel. For example, much of my work has to do with robot audition and
enabling robots to extract meaningful signals from a noisy acoustic environment. I was able to
examine work involving multiple-speaker detection by a humanoid, giving me ideas on new
algorithms that could assist our own systems [1]. Additionally, I was able to present my own
work to a large audience and communicate my work to the larger research community.
The day after the conference, I participated in a student outing to Kyoto. Other members of the
outing included Kyoto University’s Angelica Lim, who previously invited our group to publish an
article in a journal she edited [2], and Seung-Joon Yi, a member of a robotics group at the
University of Pennsylvania who has collaborated with Drexel on other projects. By attending
this outing, I not only learned more about the culture and history of Kyoto, but was able to
form closer links with these and other students, opening the door to future collaborations and
publications.
I subsequently presented my work to Dr. Kazuhiro Nakadai’s research group at Honda Research
& Development in Saitama, members of Dr. Hiroshi Okuno’s lab in Kyoto University, and Dr.
Jun-Ho Oh’s Hubo lab at the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in
Daejeon, Korea. I was also able to tour Dr. Atsuo Takanishi’s robotics lab at Waseda University
in Tokyo. Members of these labs showed and demonstrated their projects to me, including the
flute-playing robot at Waseda University, the theremin-playing robot at Kyoto University, the
newest Hubo models at KAIST, and the new speaker identification algorithms at Honda. I was
thus able to form closer links with all four groups, and also learn more about the current state
of the field.
[1] J. Sanchez-Riera et al, “Online Multimodal Speaker Detection for Humanoid Robots,”
Proceedings of the International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2012, pg. 126-133.
[2]: D. K. Grunberg, A. M. Batula, E. M. Schmidt, and Y. E. Kim, "Synthetic Emotions for
Humanoids: Perceptual Effects of Size and Number of Robot Platforms," Journal of Synthetic
Emotions: Special Issue on Music, Robots, and Emotion (invited paper), 2012.