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58 Chapter 5

system as being broad and simple where the perceptual abilities are robust enough and
detailed enough for these early human-robot interactions. Deep and complicated percep-
tual algorithms certainly exist. As we have learned from human infants, however, there
are developmental advantages to starting out broad and simple and allowing the percep-
tual, behavioral, and motor systems to develop in step. Kismet’s initial perceptual system
specification is designed to be roughly analogous to a human infant. While human infants
certainly perceive more things than Kismet, it is quite a sophisticated perceptual system for
an autonomous robot.
The perceptual system is decomposed into six subsystems (see figure 5.5). The devel-
opment of Kismet’s overall perceptual system is a large-scale engineering endeavor that
includes the efforts of many collaborators. I include citations wherever possible, although
some work has yet to be published. Please see the preface where I gratefully recognize the
efforts of these researchers. I describe the visual attention system in chapter 6. I cover the af-
fective speech recognition system in chapter 7. The behavior-specific and emotion-specific
perceptions (organized around the social/non-social perceptual categories) are discussed in
chapters 8 and 9. For the remainder of this chapter, I briefly outline the low-level perceptual
abilities for visual and auditory channels.

Eye, Neck
Cameras Motors

QNX
Skin Tone,
Saturated Color,
Motion, Dual-Port
Eye Detection, RAM L
CORBA Distance to Target,
Looming, Behavior Specific
Visual Threat Percepts
NT Visual Attention
Vocal Affect Animate Vision Behaviors
Recognition
Linux
CORBA CORBA
Pitch,
Energy,
Phonemes,
Sound Present,
Speech Present
Microphone
Figure 5.5
Schematic of Kismet’s perceptual systems.