: Anthropos the Robot

This Media Lab Europe robot was constructed as a platform for exploring the fine line between perceived intelligence and the implementation of complex artificial intelligence research approaches towards building and controlling autonomous robots for social interaction. This involved developing, integrating and testing technologies including: A Firewire Nervous System: a high speed modular data transfer network that runs throughout the robot providing a data backbone for sensor and actuator functionality. A custom vision system with basic object tracking and colour segmentation (Rob Burke). A motion behaviour rapid prototyping system in C#/C++ (Eva Jacobus). A speech recognition/synthesis system (Microsoft Speech, Festival TTS, CSLU Toolkit)

Robot Anthropos has been utilised in various social scenarios (to test the integration of its technologies):

• Orator (motor and speech behaviours, network communication for presentation software control)
• Social play, where Anthropos carried out short conversations with human participants (vision-coordinated motor control, speech system with scripted dialogues)