Kismet (robot)

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Kismet is now an exhibit at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA)
Kismet

Kismet is a humanoid robot from the 1990s. It comes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and consists of a head with a neck section. The robot was a popular object for a wide variety of media and gained international fame. Research with Kismet was discontinued in 2000 and since then it has been an exhibit at the MIT Museum.

Features and design

Kismet can interact with people and simulates human emotions . It has seven categories of feelings: calm, disgusted, angry, sad, interested, happy, and surprised. His technique focuses on key elements of human interaction.

The main goal was to develop or further develop an open learning system which can develop human reactions bit by bit. The system is based on the social characteristics of human children. Kismet was not used for interactions between robots, but for interactions with people.

technology

Sensors

Four high-resolution cameras serve as optical sensors . Behind each eyeball there is a camera, another between the eyes and the fourth in the nose area. The cameras register the distance and facial expressions of people. For the acoustic signals there is a lavalier microphone on the neck area , which guides them to the auditory system and is used for speech recognition .

Movements and facial expressions

Kismet has a total of 21 motors for the head and neck system. Each of these motors enables movement. The robot has three degrees of freedom for the neck, three degrees of freedom per eye, four for the lips, two for each ear, two for each eyebrow, and one for each eyelid (for opening and closing the eyelids).

Processors

Cables lead from the robot itself to an associated computer network . It consists of 15 processors that run on four different operating systems . Of these, nine computers are used for the visual system, i.e. to recognize people's facial expressions. These computers run on a QNX system (a Unix variant). Four other processors model the basic emotional states. They are also responsible for behaviors and more complex perceptions. These four computers run on the Linux operating system .

A computer processes the voice signal. In doing so, one concentrates more on the emotional tones in the voice than on speech sounds (phonemes) or the language content. The language calculator also runs on a Linux system. Another computer synthesizes the speech. He shapes Kismet's language emotionally, e.g. B. happy, sad or surprised. This computer runs on an NT operating system.

Systemic components

Kismet's system architecture consists of six sub-systems. These modules do not form a simple chain from the sensory inputs to the reactions. They are in different, sometimes mutual, interrelationships. The six components are: the coarse extraction ( low-level feature extraction system ), the complex extraction ( high-level perception system ), the attention system , the motivation system , the behavior of the system (engl. behavior system (engl.) and the motor system motor system ). The motivational system has two subsystems, namely the homeostatic system and the emotional system. With the vocal system, the system for face and body positions and the orientation system for the head and eyes, the motor system contains three sub-systems.

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