Cog, now on a national tour of science museums, is the first humanoid developed in the Humanoid Robotics Group.

I developed a 2 DOF Series Elastic Actuator hand for Cog and outfitted the torso to be force controlled.

My master's thesis on Cog learned a set of arm pose primitives from training data. These were then used to compose novel arm motions during social imitation interactions. Sadly, no video remains of this work. In it, a person would wave their arms in front of Cog and Cog would imitate the movement. The visual perception for this work was developed by Brian Scassellati.

Cog is no longer an active project.


Edsinger, Aaron. "A Gestural Language for a Humanoid Robot", Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Master's Thesis, Cambridge, MA, 2000. [PDF]