Edition: U.S. / Global

A Passion to Build a Better Robot, One With Social Skills and a Smile

Published: June 10, 2003

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Dr. Cynthia L. Breazeal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is famous for her robots, not just because they they are programmed to perform specific tasks, but because they seem to have emotional as well as physical reactions to the world around them. They are "embodied," she says, even "sociable" robots — experimental machines that act like living creatures.

As part of its design triennial, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York is exhibiting a "cyberfloral installation," by Dr. Breazeal, which features robotic flowers that sway when a human hand is near and glow in beautiful bright colors.

"The installation," said Dr. Breazeal, 35, "communicates my future vision of robot design that is intellectually intriguing and remains true to its technological heritage, but is able to touch us emotionally in the quality of interaction and their responsiveness to us — more like a dance, rather than pushing buttons."

Dr. Breazeal (pronounced bruh-ZILL) wrote about her adventures as a modern-day Mary Shelley in her book "Designing Sociable Robots," released this year by M.I.T. Press. She was also a consultant on the Steven Spielberg movie "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence."

Q. What is the root of your passion for robots?

A. For me, as for many of us who do robotics, I think it is science fiction. My most memorable science fiction experience was "Star Wars" and seeing R2D2 and C3PO. I fell in love with those robots.

Q. R2D2 and C3PO were good robots, friendly. But so many of the robots of science fiction are either hostile, or at least misunderstood, like Frankenstein's monster and HAL of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Why have fictional robots been so menacing?

A. We have a lot of suspicion of robots in the West. But if you look cross-culturally, that isn't true. In Japan, in their science fiction, robots are seen as good. They have Astro Boy, this character they've fallen in love with and he's fundamentally good, always there to help people.

In a lot of Western science fiction, you need some form of conflict, whether it's aliens or robots. I think in Western culture, being more suspicious of science, and hubris, you'll see a lot of fear of creating something that goes out of control.

Also a lot of Western sci-fi books and movies are about the basic notion of taking responsibility for what you create. If you're talking about creating any new technology, this is always an issue.

Q. How did you get into robot building?

A. I was raised on technology. I grew up in Livermore, Calif., a town of physicists and cowboys. My parents worked at the government laboratories there. So technology was very normal for me.

Before college, I wanted to be a doctor or an engineer. At college, U.C. Santa Barbara, I considered NASA and becoming an astronaut. At college, they had just started up a center on robotics and it was this cool new thing. I remember sitting with one of my friends who was talking about building planetary rovers for NASA, and that seemed so wonderful.

So when it came to applying to graduate school, I was naturally drawn to Prof. Rod Brooks's robotics lab at M.I.T., where they were doing pioneering work developing micro-rovers, those robotic vehicles that might do experiments on other planets for NASA.

Q. The first robots you worked on were made for use in space?

A. Yes. A lot of my early work was actually a precursor to these micro-rovers that are in use today at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Rod Brooks, my adviser, had been developing these rough-terrain robots that were insectlike in the way they looked and how their computerized brains functioned.

Rod went on a sabbatical and when he came back, he said, "I've got one big project left in me and we're going to do a humanoid robot now." The common wisdom was first you do robot insects, then reptiles, dogs and eventually humans.

The thing that really intrigued me about a humanoid project was the chance to work on the robots' ability to interact with people. This would no longer be the robotics that others had done: robots in space, in minefields, as substitutes for humans in dangerous environments. This was about bringing robots into human environments so that they could help people in ways that hadn't been possible before.

I was curious to see if benevolent interactions with people could accelerate and enrich the learning process of machines. In short, I wanted to see if I could build a robot that could learn from people and actually could learn how to be more socially sophisticated. It was that thinking that led to Kismet; my work on it was my doctoral thesis.

Q. Does your robot Kismet look like a human?

A. No. It is more a robotic cartoon. It doesn't have arms and legs; its mechanical parts are uncovered. In fact, it is mostly a face. It has eye-brows, surgical tubing for lips so that it can smile and frown, pink ears used for expression and showing arousal and things like that. The engineering on Kismet was inspired by the social development of human infants.

In Japan in the 1980's, they were already starting on humanoid robots. But Kismet was the first developed to specialize in face-to-face social interactions with humans.