Robots that respond to your gestures

posted by Bob Duffy on August 19, 2008

During the Industry Insights webcast at IDF, Rodney Brooks, from MIT demostrates how robots can be programmed to respond to you gestures and can mimick emotional responses.

I was not able to sit in this presentation so I watched from the webcast from the bloggers lounge and was able to capture part of Rodney's presentation for this post using my Flip video camera, not ideal but cool in a very geeky way.

This webcast was full of big ideas, visionary thinking and demonstrations that seemed to be well fitted for the SciFi channel.

In the demo Rodney shows us how robotics are advancing so they can better interact with humans by interpreting gestures and vocal tones.  He believes like the PC, robots will become more mainstream and will be able to better interact and work with humans by understanding how humans emote and how we instinctually interpret the gestures and vocal tones of others.

It occurred to me in his presentation that as we improve robotics to be more functional, we are trying to teach computers more about us, by being more like us..  The more a computer can understand how humans think, how humans act, and how we are social, then the easier it is for them to do the tasks needed to work with us.

This demonstration shows us an early glimpse of how the latest silicon & programming advancements are edging their way to become more human.

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tagged: idf, idf2008, robotics, Rodney Brooks