The Government Is Taking a Closer Look at Google Eating Motorola [Google]

When ginormous companies try to buy gigantic companies, there's always cries about monopolies, anti-trustiness and all those nasty words. So it's really no surprise that the Department of Justice is now making a "second request" for more information about Google swallowing Motorola.

Google, to their credit, is still confident that the deal will still go through, saying:

While this means we won't be closing right away, we're confident that the DOJ will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile ecosystem will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. We'll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

But that's what they're supposed to say! The WSJ reports that the DOJ isn't saying that they'll block the deal but rather there are antitrust issues that are worth a second look. $12.5 billion dollars, Google making Android and Motorola making Android phones, yeah it all seems like fair grounds to ask for more information. We'll see what comes out of this closer look in time. [Google Public Policy Blog via WSJ]

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With Kinect, Robots Are One Step Closer to Copying Everything About You [Video]

Asimo, the Honda humanoid, one of the world's most loved robots, was showing off its dance moves this week at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in San Francisco.

The robot was here to demonstrate some new tricks it's been learning from scientists at the Honda Research Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

Victor Ng-Thow-Hing, Behzad Dariush, and colleagues work with Asimo seeking to develop robotics technologies that can assist people, especially in terms of mobility.

In one demonstration, the scientists showed how Asimo can mimic a person's movements in real time. The researchers use Microsoft's Kinect 3D sensor to track selected points on a person's upper body, and their software uses an inverse kinematics approach to generate control commands to make Asimo move. The software prevents self collisions and excessive joint motions that might damage its system and is integrated with Asimo's whole-body controller in order to maintain balance. The researchers say that the ability of mimicking a person in real time could find applications in robot programming and interactive teleoperation, among other things.

In another demo, the scientists showed how they're using gestures to improve Asimo's communication skills. They're developing a gesture-generating system that takes any input text and analyzes its grammatical structure, timing, and choice of word phrases to automatically generate movements for the robot. To make the behavior more realistic, the scientists used a vision system to capture humans performing various gestures, and then they incorporated these natural movements into their gesture-generating system.

This was my first encounter face to face with Asimo, and upon close inspection I noticed something on Asimo's face that I didn't know it was there. Take a look at the photo below. Can you see it?

Photos: Evan Ackerman; video: Erico Guizzo and Evan Ackerman

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