Quasi the Intelligent Robot

Jake David writes to tell us about a uniquely emotive robot — named Quasi — developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations. Here is a a video of the robot in action. Note that the animatronic figure is little more than the emotive organ of the robot, whose entirety encompasses the display booth as well. From the CMU page: "Quasi has a number of features in addition to his eyelids for conveying emotion, the most prominent of which are Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae. These combine red, green, and blue LEDs... His antennae can move both forward and backward as well as in and out, giving them an expressive quality not unlike that of a dog's ears."

Comments

He's not a robot... there IS someone running him

[zyzzx0]

Watch the discovery channel special on Quasi here at youtube, here. They only designed the table, the robotics. There's no voice recognition other than the person w/ the headphones behind the robot.

Very cool - not intelligent

[m_hemaly]

FTA:

One additional device, an auto-talk board, does not respond to a DMX command. Rather, it is fed a pre-recorded or live line level audio signal and it moves a servo (mounted on Quasi's jaw) in proportion to the signal's amplitude. The net effect is that Quasi appears to speak in time with the audio, without having to invest any time in pre-animating mouth movements.

I think this means that a human was talking to this auto-talk board behind the scenes. The whole innovation seems focused on the various methods used to convey emotions, which I think are pretty cool and think outside the box of mimicking facial expressions, not on any aspect of AI or intelligent conversations.

Re:I figured it out

[MickDownUnder]

No he's actually sitting at desk in front of a computer behind the wall. I think this robot is just as impressive. Hmmm slashdot editors... hint.... if u did .... google-> quasi robot You might have saved us all 10 minutes of time and not posted this crap

It's just a puppet

[EccentricAnomaly]

There's someone sitting under that table with a microphone!

This other youtube video reveals that it's just a really fancy puppet.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3tlqvdAaQNE

C'mon did you really think that video was real... if it were, it could pass the Turing test.