Dec 14 2010
A team of researchers under the leadership of Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusett Institute of Technology, have developed a robot that can interact with humans.
Dubbed ‘Nexi’, the robot can exhibit several facial emotions like slanting its face in annoyance and lifting its eye-brows in astonishment. It can pick a maximum weight of 10 pounds using its robotic hands and touch sensitivity is offered by a plastic envelope of chassis.
Nexi Robot
Several teams have developed various components of the robot. Xitome Design had developed the overall layout and modeling of the robot. In order to facilitate the robot to carry out three dimensional movements at the base of the neck, appropriate alterations are made at the head and neck.
Nexi replicates the speed of a human and its face is exclusively designed to enable the mandible, eyebrows, gaze and eyelids to exhibit a broad range of expressions. These facial emotions were offered by the MIT Media Lab.
The innovative chassis has been built by the University of Massachusetts’s Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics, on the basis of the uBot5 mobile manipulator, which is stable even on two wheels. The robot was called as MDS (mobile, dexterous, social) Robot by Cynthia Breazeal.
Other features of Nexi include eyes with several video cameras and ears with an arrangement of microphones, navigational ability in indoors, laser rangefinder and a 3-D infrared camera for offering instantaneous tracing of voices, objects and people close by.