BeatBots is a project that aims to explore the rhythmic properties of social interaction through dance-oriented nonverbal play with children. We are designing a software architecture using Max/MSP to allow robots to perceive, generate, and synchronize with rhythmic behaviors as we humans do.
Roillo is a social interactive robotic toy designed to play with children. He started as a project for a course in Human-Robot Interaction. We are currently building a physical prototype.
The Roboceptionist is a robot in a booth at the entrance to Newell-Simon Hall. A collaboration with the School of Drama, the characters (Valerie and Tank) can provide directions to offices in the building, talk about the weather, and tell stories about their ever-changing "lives." The project explores how to use entertainment to encourage repeated human-robot interaction over a long period of time.
At ATR, I implemented a system that locates human heads and arms and allows the robot DB to follow pointing gestures with his arms.
At Yale I worked on a system that uses gaze-tracking technology to record the gaze trajectories of typical and autistic individuals as they observe videos of social situations. We are attempting to use this information to enhance the relative salience of social areas of the scene in real-time.
At Carnegie Mellon we are testing the effectiveness of various low-level perceptual filters by applying them to Simons's and Rensink's change-blindness demonstrations.
Nico is a baby-like humanoid robot at Yale designed to explore cognitive development and social learning. I worked on integrating components of the robot's active vision system and developed a system that learned to distinguish between animate and inanimate motion.
We have written a Braitenberg vehicle simulator that allows users to specify a path and use a genetic algorithm to evolve a vehicle that follows the path.