Word: robotically
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...could not. Kismet calls people toward it. And when they get too close for its cameras to see them well, it protects its personal space and pulls away. When an object suddenly appears in front of it, Kismet quickly withdraws and flashes a look of bewilderment. Most winningly, the robot is able to engage in a babbling "conversation" with humans in its midst. When it "talks," it takes turns with its human interlocutor, a decent representation of a conversation between an adult and an infant. By one measure, Kismet is a clear success: people love it. When visitors arrive...
That deficiency was driven home to Breazeal one day when she was interacting with Cog. Breazeal put an eraser down in front of Cog, and Cog used its arm to pick the eraser up. When the robot put the eraser down, Breazeal picked it up. Breazeal and Cog continued taking turns picking the eraser up and putting it down. To an outside observer, it might have looked like the robot was intentionally playing with Breazeal, but Cog's mind just didn't work that way. It was while engaging in this deceptively human-feeling interaction that Breazeal decided...
Breazeal was uniquely suited to the task of building this new robot. She grew up near the technology-rich area that would become Silicon Valley. Her father was a mathematician and her mother a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her parents raised her, she says, to be "protechnology." Breazeal became captivated by robots at age 8 when she saw Star Wars for the first time. "I just fell in love with the Droids," she says, especially R2-D2. "But I was old enough to realize those kinds of robots didn't exist." Growing up, she considered becoming...
...problem is, robots have fewer opportunities than babies to learn from their environment. Humans spend a great deal of time talking to and nurturing young people. Robots do not get that kind of attention and outside stimulation. "We don't learn in impoverished educational environments, but that's what we expect the robot to do," she says. Breazeal has tried to provide Kismet with the tools to engage in this kind of socially situated learning...
...earliest stroke of genius may have been a remote-controlled robot he named Linex. His imagination was shaped by what he had read in library books and by the robot on the television series Lost in Space. For nearly a year he scavenged at junkyards to find the parts he needed to build the robot's base. He gave it wheels, and he used his sisters' reel-to-reel tape recorder for its eyes. The guts from his brothers' walkie-talkies transmitted signals to the hunk of metal and controlled its movements. Linex won the state science fair...