Cynthia Brazeal from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is well-known for her robots, which do much more than mechanical stunts. Her robots could perform tasks but what makes them special is that they could also display emotions.
According to Brazeal, the future of robotics lies in robots, which are sociable and embodied. Currently, technological tools such as Face book and Twitter rule the roost, and help people to be social and act as communication platforms, and this would be the role of the robots in the future.
Brazeal had long since aspired to build a robot ,which could both learn and react with humans, which led her to a doctoral thesis at MIT with Kismet, a robot designed to recognize the cadences in the voice of a speaker and react and further participate in social interactions with people. According to her, the robot could express a kind of emotion. Later, she established the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab with a focus on developing robots, which could interact in human settings.
According to Brazeal, robots were tools for radically transforming telecommunication on video screens into tele-interactions. She could visualize a future when video screens would display a person’s face even while speaking on a mobile phone.
Brazeal’s team first created the prototype of the robots and then tested them on users. They found that the listeners were definitely more psychologically involved and had more empathy to collaborate with the speaker on the other end, if they could see them. She envisions a future when such collaborative and sociable robots would be coaches or mentors for human beings. She states that if there was a tiny robot sitting on the person’s shoulder coaching him about healthy eating choices, it would be of great benefit to weight management. She tested this idea by creating a robotic management coach, Autumn, which would motivate the user to opt for healthy choices and make eye contact with the users. Autumn was given out to 15 people and computers with motivational dialogues incorporated in them were handed over to another group of 15 people. They found that people liked the robots and gave them names and even dressed them up in outfits while interacting with them, in contrast to those who had received the computers, in spite of the fact that both of them gave identical advice.
Source: http://robotic.media.mit.edu/