The Babybot is the LIRA-Lab humanoid robot. The latest version has eighteen degrees of freedom distributed along the head, arm, torso, and hand. The head and hand were custom designed at the lab. The arm is an off-the-shelf small PUMA manipulator and it is mounted on a rotating torso. The Babybot's sensory system is composed of a pair of cameras with space-variant resolution, two microphones each mounted inside an external ear, a set of three gyroscopes mimicking the human vestibular system, positional encoders at each joint, a torque/forse sensor at the wrist and tactile sensors at the fingertips and the palm.

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The DARPA Urban Challenge was held on November 3, 2007, at the former George AFB in Victorville, Calif.  Building on the success of the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenges, this event required teams to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic, performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking and negotiating intersections.  This event was truly groundbreaking as the first time autonomous vehicles have interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment.

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Hanson is regarded as a world leader in robotics. The core innovations of HRI spring from Hanson's research in materials, mechanics and software. WIRED called Hanson's work "genius", Science called him "head of his class" in social robots, and BBC called his robots "among the world's most advanced". Hanson has published in fields of materials science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics, and holds one patent with two more pending. Hanson and his robots have been featured in the NY Times, Popular Science, Science, IEEE Spectrum, WIRED, BBC, CNN, discovery Channel, and other media venues. In addition to material science and robotics, the secret to Hanson's robotics is artistry. Each robot is a four dimensional sculpture - every expression is sculpted via the action of the mechanics and polymer.

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The Sociable Machines Project develops an expressive anthropomorphic robot called Kismet that engages people in natural and expressive face-to-face interaction. Inspired by infant social development, psychology, ethology, and evolution, this work integrates theories and concepts from these diverse viewpoints to enable Kismet to enter into natural and intuitive social interaction with a human caregiver and to learn from them, reminiscent of parent-infant exchanges. To do this, Kismet perceives a variety of natural social cues from visual and auditory channels, and delivers social signals to the human caregiver through gaze direction, facial expression, body posture, and vocal babbles. The robot has been designed to support several social cues and skills that could ultimately play an important role in socially situated learning with a human instructor. These capabilities are evaluated with respect to the ability of naive subjects to read and interpret the robot's social cues, the robot's ability to perceive and appropriately respond to human social cues, the human's willingness to provide scaffolding to facilitate the robot's learning, and how this produces a rich, flexible, dynamic interaction that is physical, affective, social, and affords a rich opportunity for learning.

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Robotics Telepresence

Robotic Telepresence is the ability to transport yourself to a remote location without going there. It is similar to video conferencing but whereas video conferencing, such as Cisco and ATT Telepresence, gives you only a small window into the remote world, Robotic Telepresence gives you a presence, instantly transporting you there and enabling you to move around, look about, and interact with people, objects, and the environment as if you are actually there.

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