kismet

Cut from original image © Jared C. Benedict in Wikimedia Commons

The robot of the day is Kismet, designed and built at MIT. Kismet was probably one of the robots that first made me start thinking along the line of my current research.

In recent months my research has used Kismet mainly as an example of a robot where the concentration of design has been on the face. My research questions whether faces are a requirement for successful human-robot interactions, and more broadly, whether robots need to be recognisably human-like in order to support sophisticated human-robot communication.

In general, I would like to argue that in fact there are tremendous possibilities and advantages in using other forms for robot design.