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96 Modern Robotics

Cog

In the early 1990s, Brooks and his colleagues began designing a
robot that would embody human eye movement and other behav-
iors. The robot would be called Cog, short for “cognition,” or
thought. (There is a touch of irony in this name because Brooks
was not emphasizing AI cognition in the usual sense.) Each of Cog’s
two eyes had separate wide-angle and narrow-angle cameras that
mimicked the human eyes’ central foveae. Cog’s eyes were mounted
on gimbals so they could easily turn to track objects, aided by the
movement of the robot’s head and neck (it had no legs). Cog also had
“ears”—microphones that can help it find the source of a sound.
In “The Deep Question,” Brooks recalled that as he watched Cog
interact with researchers and other visitors to the lab, he was sur-
prised at how humans reacted to their robotic mimic:

. . . the system with very little content inside it, seems eerily human
to people. We get its vision system running, with its eyes and its

Rodney Brooks is shown here with Cog, a robot that could see and “pay
attention” in humanlike ways. (Photo ©MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,
courtesy of Rodney Brooks)