Cynthia Breazeal and her team at MIT are building and training robots to interact with people. In this TED talk, she shows a variety of different robots being developed and how they can be used as an important new scientific tool.
Some of the different types of robots featured were a robot diet coach, an interactive robot video game for kids, and a robotic attachment to a cellphone that lets the users communicate hand gestures.
My favorite robot featured was Leonard. It was particularly interesting to see how he reacted to something he was unfamiliar with, a cookie monster puppet. His reaction when he is told that Cookie Monster is bad and scary and wants to take all of Leonard's cookies is awesome.
The most significant thing that I learned from the talk is that people seem to react very positively toward social robots. In the case of the robot diet coach the people interacting with the robot had much better results than the group using a simple computer program. One of the reasons for this is that people trusted the robot more.
Cynthia Breazeal's Website
Dr. Cynthia Breazeal's Website with information about her research and the robots she and her students have developed.
MIT Media Lab: Personal Robots Group
This is the website for the Personal Robots Group at MIT. Here you can see all the different robots that are being developed by them as well as other information about the group.
NOVA scienceNOW: Social Robots
A clip from NOVA on PBS about Social Robots. This video shows several different social robots that are being developed, highlighting how realistic they are becoming. This is a must see!
Watch the full episode. See more NOVA scienceNOW.
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