Lego Phobot Is Scared Of You
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 24 of March , 2008 at 1:52 am
The 3rd annual Human-Robot Interaction Conference was held in Amsterdam about a week ago. The winner of the Lego Mindstorms Student Design Competition was Phobot, a cute little robot who’s scared of things:
Phobot expresses himself through sounds, postures, movement, simulated heartbeats, and movable eyebrows. He runs a program that emulates a learning process: in the beginning, Phobot is naturally curious, but scared of even small objects. If you hold his hand and assure him that everything is okay (aww!) he’ll get used to an object of a given size, and start to dance a little bit. Using this method, you can accustom him to larger and larger objects until he becomes invincible. Phobot was conceived as a companion to children who are scared of things; the idea is that by helping Phobot to overcome his fears, it will be easier for the child to understand their own.
Category: Artificial Intelligence, Competitive
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Comment by bla
Made Monday, 24 of March , 2008 at 5:29 am
I’m scared of that woman. Tell her to stop talking so much.