Word: robotical
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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...
From a physical standpoint, Kismet isn't much of a robot. It can't walk and grab things, as many robots today can. It doesn't even have arms, legs or a body. What sets Kismet apart is that it has been built with drives and equipped to engage in an array of interactions with people to satisfy those drives. In social terms, big-eyed, babbling Kismet may be the most human robot ever built. And it may be the closest we have yet come to building the kind of robots that populate science fiction and interact with humans...
Kismet is the creation of Cynthia Breazeal, a postdoc in the Humanoid Robotics Group at M.I.T. Breazeal has studied for years under Rodney Brooks, perhaps the leading figure in the world of robotics. Breazeal got the idea for Kismet when she was working with Cog, another robot in Brooks' lab that was built to have the physical capacities of a human infant. Cog has a torso, a head and arms, and it can engage in simple tasks like turning a crank or playing with a slinky. Cog is physically gifted but completely lacking in social skills...
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...