Page 136 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

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SOCIABLE ROBOTS

CYNTHIA BREAZEAL AND KISMET

he baby watches the dangling toy with apparent interest—eyes
Twide, a happy burbling vocalization seeming to convey approval.
But when the toy is spun too fast, she scrunches her eyes shut and
issues a squeal or two of protest. What brought this change of
mood? The new but attentive parent is not sure, but she goes back
to dangling the toy slowly. The parent is learning how to play with
a baby. The baby is learning how to communicate with other people
and negotiate her needs. She is learning how to be a sociable mem-
ber of the primate species called Homo sapiens.
But what if the baby were not a baby, but a robot? This is not
a robot that builds something in a factory or a robot that learns
how to navigate laboratory corridors. This robot, named Kismet,
is helping robotics researcher Cynthia Breazeal learn more about
how babies become social creatures—and perhaps how humans and
advanced robots can learn from each other.

In Love with the Droids

Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1968, Cynthia Breazeal (pro-
nounced like “Brazil”) grew up in a high-tech environment when
the family moved to California. Her father was a mathematician,
and her mother was a computer scientist at the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory. When she was only eight, Breazeal saw the movie Star
Wars and, as she told Adam Cohen of Time, “I just fell in love

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