Robots

I'm interested in building adaptive, general-purpose robots, to try and understand what might underlie our own adaptivity. In the Humanoid Robotic Groups we work on many robots including Cog, Kismet, Coco, Cardea, and Obrero. For more on my work, see my research page; for more information on each of these robots, read on.

Cog

Cog is an upper torso humanoid that has previously been given abilities such as visually-guided pointing, rhythmic operations such as turning a crank or driving a slinky, and responding to some simple forms of joint attention. My work enabled Cog to learn from experience, and in particular to learn to recognize and use objects by interacting with them through physical experimentation.

Cog (more information)

Kismet

Kismet is an expressive anthropomorphic head useful for human interaction work (see videos). Kismet is now retired and has moved to the MIT museum. Follow-on work to Kismet exists in the form of K4 (shown below) and Leonardo at the media lab.

Kismet (more information)

K4, a follow-on to Kismet

Coco

Coco is a cute gorilla-like robot that walks on its knuckles. I experimented with visually-guided reaching on Coco, where the robot used the shadow cast by its arm as a depth cue.

Coco (more information)

Cardea

Cardea is a next-generation robot currently at the early design stage. It is a robot designed primarily to get through doors by opening the handles and pushing, just like a person would. The long-term plan is to make a mobile robot with access to both the social and physical world.

Cardea (more information)

Obrero

Obrero is an upper-torso humanoid robot created be Eduardo Torres-Jara. Along with Lorenzo Natale, we've been collaborating on getting some interesting multi-modal perception of manipulation going.

Obrero (more information)