Page 117 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

THOUGHTFUL ROBOTS 97

head moving, and it hears a sound and it saccades to that, and then
the head moves to follow the eyes to get them back into roughly the
center of their range of motion. When it does that, people feel it has
a human presence. Even to the graduate students who designed the
thing, and know that there’s nothing in there, it feels eerily human.

As an example of how Cog could engage human attention, film-
maker Sanjida O’Connell wrote in the London Times that the
researchers

wanted to show that Cog was not programmed to behave in a set
manner. So we threw a sixth birthday party for the robot with cake
and champagne, and filmed Cog watching its guests. Cog, although
only a torso, is humanoid—it has arms with touch sensors on its
fingers, it can hear and see, and it is attracted by movement. It is
also being taught to copy: for instance, a student will sort a pile of
coloured bricks, with the idea that Cog will watch and learn.

One memorable moment was at the birthday party. A baby reached
out to Cog and the two, robot and baby, interacted. The baby treated
the robot as if it was a person. Cog appeared to be fascinated by the
baby but is, as yet, unable to speak or to show emotion.

The work with Cog continued in the late 1990s with the develop-
ment of Kismet, a robot that included dynamically changing “emo-
tions.” Brooks’s student Cynthia Breazeal would build her own
research career on Kismet and what she calls “sociable robots.”

Practical Robotics

By 1990, Brooks wanted to apply his idea of behavior-based robotics
to building marketable robots that could perform basic but useful
tasks. Enlisting two of his most innovative and hardworking stu-
dents, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, Brooks founded what became
iRobot Corporation. As the new millennium dawned, the company