Social Robots
Cherry, the Little Red Robot with a Personality
Cherry, the Little Red Robot with a Personality (shown on the left), was one of the first fully integrated mobile robotic systems to test human-robot interaction in social contexts.
We built Cherry to provide guided tours of our Computer Science suite to visitors. Cherry had a map of the office floor, she could recognize faculty with machine vision and talk to visitors about each faculty's research. She would also get frustrated - and showed it - if she kept trying to find a professor whose door would always be closed…
We evaluated the reactions of people before they met Cherry and after they met her: the more people interacted with her, the more they liked her. When the project ended, many people told us they missed her roaming around our Computer Science floor, and asked if we could bring her back.
Cherry helped pave the way for further research in social robotics, and establish Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) as a necessary new field of study. Indeed, Human-Robot Interaction raises research questions that are different from Human-Computer Interaction and that need to be addressed accordingly.
You can read about our results in this following article:
C. Lisetti, S. Brown, K. Alvarez, A. Marpaung. A Social Informatics Approach to Human-Robot Interaction with a Service Social Robot. IEEE Transactions on Sytems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol. 34, N. 2: 195-209, 2004.
Cherry, the Little Red Robot with a Personality (shown on the left), was one of the first fully integrated mobile robotic systems to test human-robot interaction in social contexts.
We built Cherry to provide guided tours of our Computer Science suite to visitors. Cherry had a map of the office floor, she could recognize faculty with machine vision and talk to visitors about each faculty's research. She would also get frustrated - and showed it - if she kept trying to find a professor whose door would always be closed…
We evaluated the reactions of people before they met Cherry and after they met her: the more people interacted with her, the more they liked her. When the project ended, many people told us they missed her roaming around our Computer Science floor, and asked if we could bring her back.
Cherry helped pave the way for further research in social robotics, and establish Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) as a necessary new field of study. Indeed, Human-Robot Interaction raises research questions that are different from Human-Computer Interaction and that need to be addressed accordingly.
You can read about our results in this following article:
C. Lisetti, S. Brown, K. Alvarez, A. Marpaung. A Social Informatics Approach to Human-Robot Interaction with a Service Social Robot. IEEE Transactions on Sytems, Man and Cybernetics, Vol. 34, N. 2: 195-209, 2004.
AAAI Robot Competition: Hors d'Oeuvres Anyone?
We won the Nils Nilsson Award for Integrating AI Technologies and the Technical Innovation Award when we competed at the AAAI Robot Competition: Hors D'oeuvre Anyone at the National Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2000 organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The task was to use robots to entertain, engage and serve hors d'oeuvres at the conference main reception, to as many guests as possible - without running them over!
We were the first team to introduce a pair of collaborating robots - Butler (taller, shown on the left) and its assistant (right): Butler moved around the crowd offering hors d'oeuvres on its tray; a laser sensor enabled it to know when a treat was taken, hence to determine when the tray was getting low on food and needed refilling. Sonars enabled them to avoid obstacles such as guests... The assistant stood by the hors d'oeuvres refill station until called by Butler to bring a new full tray for tray exchange.
Moreover, they were designed with an emotion-based three-layer architecture which simulated some of the roles of emotions during human decision-making: e.g. if the assistant was too slow, Butler's frustration would increase (and be expressed) with time, until it decided to get the tray itself. If you're wondering about the armadillo theme, the competition was in Texas...
You can this article to learn about how we implemented this work: R. Murphy, C. Lisetti, R. Tardif, L. Irish, and A. Gage. Emotion-Based Control of Cooperating Heterogeneous Mobile Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 18, No. 5, October 2002.
We also won the red Amigobot at the AAAI Conference, which led to our Cherry little robot project (shown above).
We won the Nils Nilsson Award for Integrating AI Technologies and the Technical Innovation Award when we competed at the AAAI Robot Competition: Hors D'oeuvre Anyone at the National Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2000 organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The task was to use robots to entertain, engage and serve hors d'oeuvres at the conference main reception, to as many guests as possible - without running them over!
We were the first team to introduce a pair of collaborating robots - Butler (taller, shown on the left) and its assistant (right): Butler moved around the crowd offering hors d'oeuvres on its tray; a laser sensor enabled it to know when a treat was taken, hence to determine when the tray was getting low on food and needed refilling. Sonars enabled them to avoid obstacles such as guests... The assistant stood by the hors d'oeuvres refill station until called by Butler to bring a new full tray for tray exchange.
Moreover, they were designed with an emotion-based three-layer architecture which simulated some of the roles of emotions during human decision-making: e.g. if the assistant was too slow, Butler's frustration would increase (and be expressed) with time, until it decided to get the tray itself. If you're wondering about the armadillo theme, the competition was in Texas...
You can this article to learn about how we implemented this work: R. Murphy, C. Lisetti, R. Tardif, L. Irish, and A. Gage. Emotion-Based Control of Cooperating Heterogeneous Mobile Robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 18, No. 5, October 2002.
We also won the red Amigobot at the AAAI Conference, which led to our Cherry little robot project (shown above).
