Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision


Humanoid Robots and Social Interaction

Rodney Brooks
Director, AI lab
MIT

Wednesday, May 3, 2000
refreshments 4:05PM, talk begins 4:15PM
TCseq201, Lecture Hall B
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/

Abstract

Robots with humanoid form are a tool for investigating and validating cognitive theories. We are building a number of humanoid robots (Cog, Kismet, Coco, plus partial systems K2, M4, Lazlo, etc.) and use four guiding principles: embodiment, multi-modal integration, development, and social interaction. With these principles but without any kinematic or dynamic models, and without any central system with symbolic representations we are able to get our robots to carry out complex manipulation tasks, and interact with people using the same social cues that people have evolved over millions of years. Our systems are modeled on how humans and animals achieve the same sorts of performance.

About the Speaker

Rodney Brooks is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Engineering the Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, and is the Chairman and CTO of iRobot Corporation. He received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford in 1981, was on the research staff at CMU and MIT, then on the CS faculty at Stanford, and joined the MIT faculty in 1984. He develoepd many of the key ideas of behavior-based robots which are finding applications from consumer products to oil production to planetary exploration. His current research focuses on humanoid robots, models of development of cognition, and social interaction between people and robots.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Last modified: Mon Mar 13 11:06:53 PST 2000