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22 Chapter 2

developed at the Media Lab by the Synthetic Characters Group. For instance, in Swamped!
the human interacts with the characters using a sensor-laden plush chicken (Johnson et al.,
1999). By interacting with the plush toy, the user could control the behavior of an animated
chicken in the virtual world, which would then interact with other characters.
There are several synthetic character systems that support the use of natural language.
The Oz project at CMU is a good example (Bates, 1994). The system stressed “broad
and shallow” architectures, biasing the preference for characters with a broad repertoire
of behaviors over those that are narrow experts. Some of the characters were graphics-
oriented (such as woggles), whereas others were text-based (such as Leotard the cat). Using
a text-based interface, Bates et al. (1992) explored the development of social and emotional
agents. At Microsoft Research Labs, Peedy was an animated parrot that users could interact
with in the domain of music (Ball et al., 1997). In later work at Microsoft Research, Ball
and Breese (2000) explored incorporating emotion and personality into conversation agents
using a Baysian network technique.

Human-Friendly Humanoids
In the robotics community, there is a growing interest in building personal robots, or in
building robots that share the same workspace with humans. Some projects focus on more
advanced forms of tele-operation. Since my emphasis is on autonomous robots, I will not
dwell on these systems. Instead, I concentrate on those efforts in building robots that interact
with people.
There are several projects that focus on the development of robot faces (a few examples
are shown in figure 2.3). For instance, researchers at the Science University of Tokyo
have developed human-like robotic faces (typically resembling a Japanese woman) that

Figure 2.3
Some examples of faces for humanoid robots. To the left is a very human-like robot developed at the Science
University of Tokyo. A robot more in the spirit of a mechanical cartoon (developed at Waseda University) is shown
in the middle picture. To the right is a stylized but featureless face typical of many humanoid robots (developed
by the Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project).