Leonardo (robot)

[4] Other contributors to the project include NevenVision, Inc., Toyota, NASA's Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, and the Navy Research Lab.

The MIT Media Lab Robotic Life Group, who also studied Robonaut 1, set out to create a more sophisticated social-robot in Leonardo.

They gave Leonardo a different visual tracking system and programs based on infant psychology that they hope will make for better human-robot collaboration.

One of the goals of the project was to make it possible for untrained humans to interact with and teach the robot much more quickly with fewer repetitions.

The fanciful, purposefully young look is supposed to encourage humans to interact with it in the same way they would with a child or pet.

A facial feature tracker developed by the Neven Vision corporation isolates the faces from the captures.

Being able to understand that “others” don't have the same knowledge it has lets the robot view its environment more accurately and make better decisions based in its programming of what to do in a given situation.

[7] Leonardo can explore on its own, in addition to being trained with a human, which saves time and is a key factor in the success of a personal robot.

It must be able to learn quickly using the mechanisms humans already use (like spatial scaffolding, shared attention, mimicry, and perspective taking).

Shared attention and perspective taking are two mechanisms Leonardo has access to that help it interact naturally with humans.

Leonardo also can achieve something like empathy, however, by examining the data it gets from mimicking human facial expressions, body language, and speech.

[9] In these ways, social interaction with Leonardo seems more human-like, making it more likely humans will be able to work with the robot in a team.