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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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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 DARPA Urban Challenge features autonomous ground vehicles conducting simulated
military supply missions in a mock urban area.
Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold its third Grand Challenge competition on November 3, 2007.
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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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