Page 138 - Modern Robotics Building Versatile Macines

118 Modern Robotics

detected and responded to specified conditions or “states.” It gave
concrete reality to Brooks and Breazeal’s belief that robots, like liv-
ing organisms, grew by building more complex behaviors on top of
simpler ones, rather than depending on a single top-down design.

From Cog to Kismet

Breazeal found working on insect-like mobile robots interesting, but
her attention was really captured when Brooks announced that he
was starting a new project: to make a robot that could interact with
people in much the same way people encounter one another socially.
As Breazeal told a New York Times interviewer, she saw in
Brooks’s new project the opportunity to “[bring] robots into human
environments so that they can help people in ways that had not
been possible before.” Possibly, people in turn could “accelerate
and enrich the learning processes of machines.” Perhaps the robot,
rather like a human child, could become “socialized” as it learned
appropriate behavior.
The result of the efforts of Brooks and his colleagues (includ-
ing Breazeal, his new graduate assistant) was the creation of a 6
foot 5 inch (1.96 m) tall robot called Cog. The name, suggested by
Breazeal, was short for “cognition,” but also meaning a gear in a
mechanism, Cog attempted to replicate the sense perceptions and
reasoning skills of a human infant. Cog had eyes that focused like
those of a person, and, like an infant, could pick up on what people
nearby were doing and what they were focused on.
Breazeal had done much of the work in designing Cog’s stereo
vision system. She and another graduate student also programmed
many of the interacting feedback routines that allowed Cog to
develop its often intriguing behavior. Cog could focus on and track
moving objects and sound sources. Eventually, the robot gained the
kind of hand-eye coordination that enabled it to throw and catch a
ball and even play rhythms on a snare drum.
One day Breazeal picked up an eraser and waved it in front of
Cog. The robot tracked the eraser with its eyes, then reached out and
touched it. Breazeal waved the eraser again, and again, Cog reached
for and touched it. It was as though Cog and Breazeal were taking