Jan 30 2011
A team of researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) are working on releasing Data, a comedian robot capable of sharing jokes with people.
They are focusing on building efficient personalities for day-to-day human-robot communication, enabling robots to comprehend and express charm and hilarity. They are also investigating applications and effect of such robots in daily lives.
Comedian Robot
This project is termed as ‘Robot in the wild’ and is headed by Heather Knight, a doctorate student at CMU and the head of Marilyn Monrobot Labs. The developers of this robot believe that launching the robot “in-the-wild” also greets people to instruct robots in humorous and natural situations. They use Aldebaran Robotics’ Nao humanoid as their project platform.
The new version of Data robot was launched in December 2010. Its software was co-built by Scott Satkin and Varun Ramakrishna. The robot can receive response from the public and modify its act accordingly. In addition to already built-in sensors in the Nao platform, the researchers have included a peripheral HD camera as well as a microphone for enhancing the data collection quality.
Source: http://www.cmu.edu