Techotic

MIT Media Lab Personal Robotics Group has developed a new type of ‘emotional’ robotic program called MDS, which stand for Mobile/Dexterous/Social. The program is run by roboticist Cynthia Breazeal and her group at MIT. The flagship robot so far is Nexi, a robot that can move its body, hands, and face in a way that mimic human emotions.

Nexi moves around on a pair of dynamically self-balancing wheels, it’s arms, wrists, and hands are fully controllable, allowing it to raise stuffs up to 10 pounds/5kg. Its facial is quite expressive, almost human like and has human features including eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth. Each of Nexi’s eye has a color camera whilst on its forehead there is an IR system allowing it to make 3D map of its environment.

MIT’s eventual goal is to have Nexi and others like it to support in the study of human-robot interface, teaming, and social learning. Actually MIT needs to make a bot that doesn’t scare the living daylight out of you.

[via MIT personal robot group]