ABSTRACT
156The Sociable Machines Project at MIT has developed a robot called Kismet that is designed to interact with humans and to mimic human emotion and appearance. The robot simulates human emotion through various facial expressions, vocalizations, and movement. Kismet is able to make facial expressions through movements of ears, eyebrows, eyelids, lips, jaw, and head, just like a human. Kismet can also move and orient its eyes like a human, which allows it to control the direction of its gaze, to simulate human visual behaviors, and to focus on important items in its perceptual field. Thus, Kismet can regulate interaction by paying attention to when an interaction partner looks away as they start speaking and when they look back as they finish. When Kismet sees a person, but senses that they are too far away to converse normally, he is programmed to summon them closer. If a person gets too close to the robot, he will jump back and look startled, just as you might do if someone invaded your personal space.
