Kismet (robot)

Kismet is a humanoid robot from the 1990s. He comes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and consists of a head with the neck part. The robot was a popular object for a variety of media and gained international prominence. In 2000, the research was set with Kismet, since it acts as an exhibit at the MIT Museum.

Properties and design

Kismet can interact with people and simulates human emotions. He has seven sense Categories: Quiet, disgusted, angry, sad, interested, happy and surprised. His technique focuses on the key elements of human actions.

The main objective was to develop an open learning system and to develop, which can develop little by little human responses. The system is oriented to the social characteristics of human children. Kismet was not designed for interactions between robots with each other, but for interactions with people.

Technology

Sensors

Four high-resolution cameras are used as optical sensors. Behind every eyeball each is a camera, another between the eyes and the fourth in the nose area. The cameras register removal and facial expressions of people. For the sound, located on the neck area using a lavalier microphone, which forwards them to the auditory system and is used for speech recognition.

Movements and facial expressions

Kismet has a total of 21 engines for the head and neck system. Each of these engines makes movements. 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 on each eyelid ( for opening and closing of the eyelids ).

Processors

From the robot itself lead cable to an associated computer network. It consists of 15 processors, which run on four different operating systems. Of these only serve to recognize nine computers for the visual system, so the facial expressions of the people. These computers run on a QNX system ( a Unix variant). Four other processors model the basic emotional states. They are also responsible for complex behaviors and perceptions. These four computers running on the Linux operating system.

A computer processing the speech signal. This one focuses more on the emotional coloring in his voice than on speech sounds ( phonemes ) or the speech content. The language machine also runs on a Linux system. Another computer synthesized speech. He designed Kismets emotional language, eg happy, sad or surprised. This computer runs on a Windows NT operating system.

Systemic components

Kismets system architecture consists of six subsystems. These modules do not form a simple chain of sensory inputs to the reactions. They relate to each other in different, partly mutual interrelations. The six components are: coarse extraction ( engl. low-level feature extraction system), the complex extraction ( engl. high-level perception system), the attention system ( engl. attention system), the motivational system ( engl. motivation system), the behavior system ( engl. behavior system) and the motor system (English motor system). The motivation system has two subsystems, namely the homeostatic system and the emotion system. The motor system includes the vowel system, the system for facial and body positions and the orientation system for head and eyes three subsystems.