Keepon－robot 機器人

Keepon is a small creature-like robot designed to interact with children by directing attention and expressing emotion. Keepon's minimal design makes its behaviors easy to understand, resulting in interactions that are enjoyable and comfortable—particularly important in our research on human social development.

Keepon has soft rubber skin, cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose:

Keepon has four degrees of freedom. Attention is directed by turning +/-180° and nodding +/-40°, while emotion is expressed by rocking side-to-side +/-25° and bobbing up to 15mm:

Keepon has been used since 2003 in research on social development and communication. We have studied behaviors such as eye-contact, joint attention, touching, emotion, and imitation between Keepon and children of different ages and levels of social development. In the case of children with autism and other developmental disorders, we have had encouraging results with the use of Keepon as a tool for therapists, pediatricians, and parents to observe, study, and facilitate social interactions.

Rhythmic human-robot social interaction

Human social behavior shares much in common with dance. Our speech, as well as the movement of our body, head, and hands, is periodic and rhythmic. Social scientists such as William S. Condon and Adam Kendon have identified interactional synchrony as a phenomenon that plays an important role in the regulation and coordination of movements, vocalizations, and other social cues. We have been developing technology to allow robots like Keepon to synchronize with these social rhythms in their interactions. We believe that rhythmic synchrony is as important for establishing engagement, rapport, and comfort between a robot and a person as it is between people.

We are using Max/MSP from Cycling '74 to design our architecture for rhythmic social interaction. While we are focusing on dance-oriented play as a domain for developing and evaluating our technologies, the technologies and methods for perceiving, modeling, and generating rhythmic behaviors will be useful in less constrained interactions.

Keepon跳舞小機器人已經擄獲許多人的芳心，現在他可能會吸引到更多人了，他的發明者已經組了一家公司，打算把他商品化並取名叫BeatBots。雖然他們希望把成本降到一定合理的程度，但他們先花了30,000美元（約新台幣977,000元）做Keepon Pro模型給研究機構，來研究人類和機器人之間的互動。Keepon將會由日本的Kokoro公司來製造，這家以做令人毛骨悚然的機器人如Actroid而聞名。(癮科技)