Page 137 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

SOCIABLE ROBOTS 117

with the droids. But I was old
enough to realize that these kinds
of robots didn’t exist.” Perhaps
someday she could build them.
Besides robots, the young
Breazeal was also fascinated by
medicine and astronomy. When
she attended the University of
California at Santa Barbara
(UCSB), Breazeal considered a
future career in the National
Aero nautics Space Administra-
tion, even the possibility of
becoming an astronaut. (The
first U.S. woman astronaut,
Sally Ride, was frequently in the
news at the time.) Breazeal
noticed, though, that UCSB also
MIT researcher Cynthia Breazeal
had a robotics center, and there contemplates the robot Kismet in
she learned about the work on a mirror. This is appropriate, since
building planetary robot rovers. Kismet is intended to mirror the
After getting her undergraduate social interaction by which infants
learn. (©2005 Peter Menzel/menzel-
degree in electrical and computer
photo.com)
engineering, Breazeal applied for
graduate school at the Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology. She
had learned that the MIT robotics lab headed by Rodney Brooks
was developing a new generation of small, agile robotic rovers based
in part on how insects moved. Breazeal’s work on two such robots,
named Attila and Hannibal, helped proved the feasibility of mobile
robots for planetary exploration, while furnishing a topic for her
master’s thesis. (This type of robot would be developed further by the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, leading to the Sojourner rover
that explored Mars in 1997 and the Spirit and Opportunity rovers
that are still going strong on the Martian surface as of 2006.)
Besides its implications for space research, Breazeal’s work with
Attila and Hannibal demonstrated the feasibility of building robots
that were controlled by hundreds of small, interacting programs that