Press included Hack a Day, Butterscotch, Bright Side of News, and two videos by Robotics Trends.  We also had good fun out on the town with Evan at BotJunkie!

Keepon was selected as one of the top 10 robots of the past 10 years by GoRobotics.  At the top of the list:

We tried to pick robots that have made an impact in our culture or have impacted the hobby or science of robots in a major way…  Keepon is hard to describe, other than “incredibly cute,” and it’s still stunning how lifelike and emotive two squishy stacked balls with googly-eyes can be…  Keepon makes the “Top Robots of the past 10 Years” list simply because of his amazing ability to charm his way into mainstream culture.

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We were covered by Robots Dreams (great to finally meet you, Lem!) and Akihabara News.

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.

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UPDATE: Trender Research posted a story about our exhibit.  IEEE Spectrum also has a nice writeup.

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.

Two years ago, a yellow spongiform robot named Keepon became a minor YouTube sensation when one of its creators programmed it to do a squishy, twisty dance in time to the Spoon song “I Turn My Camera On.” The video has garnered more than 2 million hits. Now Keepon’s keepers, Marek Michalowski, a Ph.D student in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and Hideki Kozima of Miyagi University in Japan, are turning Keepon’s attention to a more serious task: to study how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) interact socially and to see if the robot may be able to help in therapy.

Keepon is just one of the many new robots that researchers are using to study and to help children with ASD. The robots do everything from studying the children’s social interactions and their emotional states to drawing them out socially.

Children with ASD often have trouble with the “dance” of body language and facial gestures needed to have successful conversations and social contact with others. Both reading the intentions of others and knowing their own emotions can be a struggle, and children often become stranded both emotionally and socially.

One baby in every 150 born today in the U.S. is diagnosed with ASD. Treatment involves a combination of therapies — behavioral, educational, physical, occupational, and speech — that is costly and not always effective. After finding that children with ASD interact more easily with robots than with people, researchers began developing expressive and interactive robots that can assist them in studying and creating effective therapy for the children.

Keepon’s gentle boogieing and its simple, innocuous appearance (five inches tall, rubbery, resembling two tennis balls stacked one on top of the other) make it perfect for interacting with socially withdrawn children. Armless and legless and only possessing two eyes and a nose, Keepon expresses itself mainly through its four movements: nodding, turning, rocking and bobbing.

However, Keepon does have a camera behind those eyes and a microphone hidden in its nose. Researchers Michalowski and Kozima have studied preschool children with ASD in Japan and have found that interacting with the robots draws the children into a range of new social behaviors. Videos of those encounters show the children feeding Keepon imaginary food, giving it imaginary medicine when it has a Band-Aid on its head, and protecting it against abuse by other children.

The most striking video shows one girl slowly forging a relationship with the robot. At first she refuses to even directly look at Keepon, but as the days go on, she draws closer to the robot, eventually touching it with a xylophone stick, then her hand. After weeks, she can be seen looking into Keepon’s eyes, putting a hat on it, and even giving it a kiss, an action she rarely performed even towards her own mother.

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P.S. Keepon will be on the Today Show next week, April 15th at 8am. More details soon!

Channel 4 Action News anchor Kelly Frey took Keepon to the Autism Society of Pittsburgh in Monroeville, where the tiny 5-inch robot was introduced to 16-year-old L.J.  L.J. caressed the robot and started talking to him before asked to share Keepon.  Another boy at the Autism Society, “Robert,” looked perplexed at first, but went on to gently touch Keepon before letting out a laugh and giving the robot a kiss.

“I can’t imagine a child with autism on any level of the spectrum that wouldn’t relate in some way. It gets into them in a way unlike anything else I’ve ever seen,” said Dan Torisky, whose son is autistic.

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