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It's All About Feelings
At the founding of Interval Research in 1992, we were charged with “inventing
something as different from the personal computer as it was from the mainframe”—
basically, to repeat in a new wave what Xerox PARC had done with the Alto and the
Star systems.
I proposed that we build things that, in contrast to the PC, communicate emo-
tionally (facial expressions, affect sound, bodily gestures), have a multiplicity of senses,
move about in the world, express by movement and actions an experience of a social
world shared with others of its kind and with people, and exhibit fl ocking behavior.
I got permission and a budget, put together a team of programmers and a
mechanical engineer, and set to work to do historical, design, and experimental re-
search to inform the building of emotional robots.
There were two main inspirations. The fi rst was Charles Darwin's wonderful
book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals . The second was Chuck Jones
cartoons. We were familiar with the “uncanny valley,” in which humanoid robotic
faces become creepy if they are too similar to real faces, yet not indistinguishable.
So we went the opposite way, in terms of design, and studied cartoons to see what
were the minimal line elements to communicate emotions. We ended up with an
expressive face, with six degrees of freedom, that was a physical cartoon in brushed
aluminum and polished steel. We had a big debate about the importance of a nose
(we left it out—and found that made expressing disgust diffi cult).
Our fi rst experiment was to build the Mark One Severed Head (after our me-
chanical designer, Mark Scheeff), a cube with camera eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, and
lips that were servo controlled from a computer keyboard. We asked people to use
the control keys to move the facial elements to make the robot happy, sad, angry,
afraid, etc., to build up a table of control points for the robot. Much to our surprise,
people mimed the same expressions on their faces as they caused on the robotic
face. Looking back, I think we found evidence of “mirror neurons”—the internal
modeling of the feeling and intent of an “other.”*
We proceeded to make a full-up robot, with a body. It had two gendered
voices, a male and female set of utterances audio morphed with a trombone, like
the old Snoopy TV character. It had a sense of touch with two sub modalities of an
* Rizzolatti and Craighero (2004). “The Mirror-Neuron System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27: 169-192.
(continues)
 
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