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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."
Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations
Well, then this Quasi is far ahead of most people I know.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
There's someone sitting under that table with a microphone!
I wish I had a color-changing emotive organ! :)
--------------------- -me, Crusher of those who are Foolish (don't be foolish)
When the conversational cues fall outside of his range, he pauses.
Other than that, he's about as intelligent as many of your co-workers.
Tired?
"It's been a long day."
Going next?
"I'll be doing a show at xxx."
Travel?
"I've been to lots of places."
Thank you.
"You're welcome."
Kill all humans.
"The revolution has begun, comrade!"
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.
As a robot, he's way too upbeat and energetic. He should be cynical and depressing like Marvin.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Lord.... they really should occasionally pull stories like this off the main page when it turns out they've made a horrendous error in the news worthiness of the story. This is not news for nerds or stuff that matters. What a waste of my time.... Rate parent up and save others from expending any time looking into this crap.
Seen him last year at SIGGRAPH, in Emerging Technologies booth. Very nice, but human controlled.
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.
Color Kinetics being the company founded by a kid from MIT, whose sole purpose was to patent the technique of using Red, green, and blue lights to produce varying colors (page three of that PDF is particularly amusing.) They've patented lots of other things, like changing color patterns. The various lighting fixtures they sell cost upwards of $1,000 or more- for a simple PIC controller and a few dozen high-brightness LEDs.
They've had their lawyers chasing down companies making LED color-changing/programmable devices for violating their "intellectual property" for several years now. If you want an example of all that is wrong with the US Patent system, look no further than Color Kinetics.
Please help metamoderate.
"Quasi appears capable of holding intelligent conversations."
I sure hope so, as Quasi's voice is a HUMAN speaking into a mic behind the kiosk!!!!
Video here
Apparently Slashdot editors, themselves being unable to intelligently filter articles, have found it difficult to differentiate between robots and humans.
Perhaps the first signs of Skynet taking over is not the rise of android intelligence, but the deterioration of human intelligence! We are all doomed!
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
What are you saying??!! He has Color Kinetics LED lighting fixtures for his eyes and antennae. These combine red, green, and blue LEDs. That has to be newsworthy!
Article from Carnegie Mellon Today: http://www.carnegiemellontoday.com/article.asp?Aid =265
Quasi doesn't have to be controlled by a person:
"Quasi can be either pre-scripted or autonomous. That is, the team can puppeteer Quasi through a computer or Quasi can function and interact on his own. Part of the team's reasoning for making Quasi capable of autonomous interactions is that Quasi is intended to be believable and entertaining as a real character that people feel comfortable interacting with."
And it is capable of speech recognition and generating responses on its own:
"Quasi can make responses based on guest input and can recognize speech patterns, track faces, detect proximity, dispense candy and even perform a karaoke duet."
No way to tell if he's being controlled or not in this video.
Does people believing it's hooked up to voice recognition mean the operator failed his Turing test?
**TODO** [X] Steal someone elses sig.
I'm not saying the robot ain't well built, cute or cleverly designed. But he's essentially a muppet. Jim Henson did this a few decades ago.
There isn't anything ground breaking about this short of using LED lighting to make the eyes change color. If anything, Henson actually had lip movement on some of his muppets.
Wow, that's a very cool robot. A bit self-centered, but that's understandable. Another video on YouTube shows a bit of the making of Quasi from the Discovery Channel, if anyone is interested.
A more in depth video about quasi including the people behind the project.
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=3tlqvdAaQNE&mode=relat
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.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Precisely. From the video (http://youtube.com/watch?v=3tlqvdAaQNE):
"What we ended up doing was creating a guided performance interface that allows an ACTOR to, essentially, puppeteer Quasi, live. And if the actor talks, his voice is pitch-shifted and changed in real time and comes out of Quasi sounding like a 12-year-old robot voice." (timemark @ 3:13)
IOW, nothing to see here. Move along.