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

Very interesting experiment ... in psychology

[Morgaine]

From the two videos on YouTube (especially the second one which explained what the team was doing), I have to say that this was an extremely interesting experiment, but not in robotics --- in human psychology.

The reaction of people to Quasi was quite amazing, and not limited to kids. I found myself reacting to Quasi as an entity too, despite knowing that this was merely an interface manipulated by humans.

This is probably a good indicator of how humans will react to real AI-based robots once they eventually appear, if they too offer such a highly human-like facade. I think it goes well beyond mere "suspension of disbelief" --- we seem to WANT to accept humanity in objects. Very intriguing.