We've already got
robotic eyedrops that can facilitate conversation and react accordingly to their surroundings, and there's even an
R2-D2 clone to get your feet shuffling once you've recovered, but researchers at
Carnegie Mellon University have developed an emotive robot, complete with his own interactive booth, that can express its feelings through body language. Quasi, a member of the Interbots Platform, resides in a booth full of gizmos that allow him to see, hear, and feel the outside world; sporting a touchscreen LCD, long-range IR sensors, motion detector, webcam, microphones, and even a candy dispenser, humans have a myriad of choices when it comes to breaking the ice with the "animatronic figure." To get his reactions in gear, 27 Hitec servo motors are used to control the motions of his eyelids and telescoping antenna, while a bevy of LED lighting fixtures illuminate to convey his swinging moods and personality without so much as a clang from his aluminum lips. The team is planning on adding
speech capability and a more mechanical armature in the near future, after which he'll probably be the self-nominated leader of the soon-to-be-uncontrollable
Swarmanoid clan.
[Via
Slashdot]
posted October 2nd 2006 11:10AM
Emo robots! I thought they were years away from building those!!!
I, for one, welcome our new therapy needing overlords. May they recieve the medication they need.
The folks at GE were blogging NEXTfest - they got a video of Quasi and put it on YouTube here.
ah, sorry about the HTML screw up. The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AceaPsewbu8
This is very similar to the Roboreceptionist project at Carnegie Mellon:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04050/274887.stm
Couple her attitude with that roboskin we saw a few weeks back - and she's a winner!
one more step to robotic takeover...
this is just a complex puppet... theres a guy that controls his every move and even talks for him through a speach modulator.
no fancy conversationalist A.I.
It's already been said, but I'll say it again: this is a puppet.
It's a puppet that looks like a robot, but a puppet none-the-less. When it was posted on Slashdot it took me waaaay too long to figure out that there hadn't been an enormous leap made in the integration of voice-synthesis, voice-recognition, image recognition, and conversational AI.
Unimpressed. Craptastic puppet. Yet another post saying it's "intelligent." not.
This was reviewed on The Science Channel on "Discoveries this Week" and consisted of a "puppeteer" behind the scenes remotely controlling "Quasi" and interacting with the audience via a voice synthesizer. It was a cool application of tech though and the puppet was controlled via real-time software rather than pre-programming although there are some preprogrammed sequences to make Quazi dance, etc. Also, the Quasi demonstrated by the builders had feet whereas this one shown above doesn't appear to.
What's this DMX interface on the diagram? I thought that DMX had seven electronically incompatible ports just like the rest of us. And if it's compatible with DMX then why isn't it compatible with other people too?
Actually, the picture posted above is of the first iteration of the robot "Quasi 1.0" Quasi 1.0 was originally completely autonomous, and as the post mentions, he was designed to be emotionally expressive without the use of a voice. Pre-recorded voice was added several months later to the system.
"Quasi 2.0", the version taken to NextFest, is usually operated via a "Guided Control System" (essentially making him a sophisticated puppet).
At the end of the day, both the Autonomous System and Guided Control System can be run on both robots, though Quasi 1.0 is typically autonomous and Quasi 2.0 is typically guided.
For more up to date information than the Carnegie Mellon Project page, you can visit the spin-off company's website at www.interbots.com.