We were invited by TTC to demonstrate Keepon at the May 21, 2009 briefing of the Congressional Robotics Caucus at the Capitol in Washington, DC. The Caucus, chaired by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Phil Gingrey (R-GA), focuses on challenges faced by the nation’s emerging robotics industry. In addition to several demos, the presentations included an unveiling of A Roadmap for US Robotics.
We brought Keepon to the 2nd HRI Robot Challenge (at the ICRA 2009 conference) in Kobe, Japan, May 14-15. He got to play with the extinct robodog AIBO, a worthy adversary…
UPDATE: Keepon has won the competition for the second year in a row! We received a lovely certificate from the Mayor of Kobe.
A Keepon is being used at Yale University‘s Department of Computer Science and Child Study Center by Dr. Brian Scassellati and his students. The Yale Daily News reports:
Bright yellow, with a cartoonish nose and pair of eyes and standing about 4 inches tall above its base, Keepon looks like a cross between a marshmallow Peep and a snowman. And Keepon has become a YouTube sensation — because this robot can dance.
Keepon can improvise to any song with a reasonable beat, said Brian “Scaz” Scassellati, a computer science professor who received tenure last week, exposing the robot’s inner workings while putting him through his paces. Partially built by former undergraduate Marek Michalowski ’02 GRD ’03 and imported from Japan, Keepon helps Scaz and his assistants — four graduate students and about seven undergraduates — study when and why humans identify with object motion.
Scaz’s team is probing a complicated question: What makes ascribe humans qualities to Keepon?
“It’s a blob that moves around,” Scassellati pointed out. But when Keepon starts to bop its “head” to pop music, many intuitively perceive it to be dancing.
“It really challenges you to define the boundaries of what you’re willing to attribute to something,” he said.
BeatBots exhibited Keepon at the RoboBusiness 2009 Conference & Expo, April 15-16 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. We were in The Technology Collaborative‘s booth. On Thursday, Marek gave a talk in the RoboMedicus (healthcare robotics) track on “Socially Interactive Robots in Therapeutic Play.”
UPDATE: Trender Research posted a story about our exhibit. IEEE Spectrum also has a nice writeup.
Keepon will be live on the Today Show tomorrow, April 15, just after 8am EST on NBC. Keepon and Marek will be the studio guests in a longer segment on robots used in autism research and therapy. Stay tuned for more news after the show.
UPDATE: Welcome, Today Show viewers! Thank you for visiting our site. Feel free to look around — check out Keepon’s videos, read some research papers, or grab a t-shirt. If your interest runs deeper, please do get in touch with us about becoming involved with our project.