"SOCIABLE MACHINE".

• Position: Lifelike robot - Brief Article

Interact with Humans

"Hello, Kismet," uttered Cynthia Breazeal in a singsong voice. Leaning closer to the object of her attention, she asked, "Are you going to talk to me?" The exchange could be familiar to any parent, but Kismet is not a child. It's a robotic head that can interact with people in a human-like way via a variety of facial expressions, head positions, and tones of voice. "The goal is to build a socially intelligent machine that learns things as we learn them, through social interactions," explains Breazeal, a postdoctoral associate at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and leader of the Kismet team.

Building a sociable machine, she believes, is key to building a smarter machine. Most current robots are programmed to be very good at a specific task--such as navigating a room--but they can't do much more. "Can we build a much more open-ended learning system?" asks Breazeal. "I'm building a robot that can leverage off the social structure that people already use to help each other learn. If we can build a robot that can tap into that system, then we might not have to program in every piece of its behavior."

The work, which began in 1997, has been heavily inspired by child developmental psychology. "The robot starts off in a rather helpless and primitive condition, and requires the help of a sophisticated and benevolent caretaker to learn and develop." Even Kismet's physical features--including big blue eyes, lips, ears, and eyebrows--are patterned after features known to elicit a caregiver response from human adults. The eyes are actually sensors that allow the robot to glean information from its environment, such as whether something is being jiggled next to its face. Kismet can respond to such stimuli--say, move its head back if an object comes too close--and communicate a number of emotion-like processes (such as happiness, fear, and disgust). A human wears a microphone to talk to the robot, which has microphones in its ears. The latter will eventually be used for sound localization.

The robot's features, behavior, and "emotions" work together, enabling Kismet to "interact with humans in an intuitive, natural way," Breazeal notes. For example, if an object is too close for the robot's cameras to see well, Kismet backs away. "This behavior, by itself, aids the cameras somewhat by increasing the distance between Kismet and the human. But the behavior can have a secondary...