David Hanson (robotics designer)

"Albert Hubo" a robot created by Hanson and the KAIST Hubo group

David Hanson is an American robotics designer and researcher, resposible for the creation of a series of realistic humanoid robots.

Biography

David Franlin Hanson, Jr. was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, where he attended Highland Park High School. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design where he received a BFA in film/animation/video. While at RISD, he also took math and science courses at nearby Brown University. Following RISD Hanson worked as a sculptor for Kern Sculpture Company in New Orleans where he worked on contracts for Universal Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering. In 1997, he contracted for Sun International, sculpting figures for the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas. Hanson then went to work as a sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering. Hanson later moved into Disney's Technical Development team where he headed several animatronic and materials projects. He continued his education at the University of California Los Angeles, taking graduate courses in art with Paul McCarthy and studying cognitive science under Jochen Triesch. Hanson began work on a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Dallas in the spring of 2002 and graduated with his doctorate degree in spring of 2007.

Hanson married Amanda Catherine Fisher on February 12, 2006. They have a son, Zeno.

Work

Haroons’s robots were shown first at the 2002 AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada [Hanson, 2002] and in 2003, he showed the Kbot at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting [Ferber, 2003]. In 2005, Hanson and team received an AAAI award for their "intelligent conversational portrait" of Philip K Dick [AI Magazine, Fall 2005]. First shown at the 2005 Nextfest, the robot incorporated thousands of pages of the writings of PKD, including journals and letters, into an LSA corpus and conversational system constructed by Andrew Olney of the University of Memphis. Steve Aydt and Hanson provided additional conversational design for the PKD-android [Hanson et al, 2005].

In November 2005, Hanson demonstrated an expressive walking humanoid, a portrait of Albert Einstein, in collaboration with the KAIST Hubo group of Korea. KAIST built the walking body, and Hanson built the head using Frubber [WIRED, 2006].

Publications

• (with Mathews, E, Olney, A, Zielke, M, Pereira, A.) (2005). Upending the uncanny valley, in AAAI conference proceedings.
• “Expanding the Design Domain of Humanoid Robots”, Proc. ICCS CogSci Conference, special session on Android Science, Vancouver, 2006.
• (with Jun-Ho O, Han I. Y., Kim J. K., Kim, W. S., Park, I.W.) “Design of Android type Humanoid Robot Albert HUBO”, Proc. IEEE/RJS IROS Robotics Conference, Beijing, 2006.
• “Expanding the Aesthetics Possibilities for Humanlike Robots”, Proc. IEEE '''Humanoid Robotics''' Conference, special session on the Uncanny Valley; Tskuba, Japan, December 2005.
• (with Olney A., Prilliman S., Mathews E., Zielke M., Hammons D., Fernandez R., Stephanou ccccthe Uncanny Valley”, Proc. AAAI’s National Conference, Pittsburgh, 2005.
• (with White V.) “Converging the Capabilities of ElectroActive Polymer Artificial Muscles and the Requirements of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 10TH Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2004.
• (with Rus D., Canvin S., Scmeirer G.) “Applications of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Ch.10 of Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots. Bar-Cohen, Y and Breazeal, C. (Ed.) SPIE Press, May 2003.
• "EAP Actuator Design for Biologically-inspired Face-Based Communication Robots". Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 9th Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2003.
• “Bio-inspired Facial Expression Interface for Emotive Robots”, Proc. AAAI National Conference in Edmonton, CA, 2002.

External links

• Hanson Robotics Home Page
• David Hanson's artwork
• Giving robots a human face
• A ubiquity interview with David Hanson
• Can robots look all too human?
• Humanoid robots put best faces forward
• Scientists try to make robots more human