Technology Review

Simon first introduced to the public during the Human Computer Interaction conference (CHI) in Atlanta last week. This clever robot is a robotic project that was developed by scientists at the laboratory Socially Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology. (See video)

“We are very interested in the field of machine learning algorithms in which we do not really need an expert to be able to interact,” says Andrea Thomaz.

Thomaz and his team developed a robot that can be used at home and need not be re-programmed with a series of tasks.

As reported by Computer World, Tuesday (04/20/2010), currently on display at the CHI conference, Simon was asked to do various tasks. Among them recognize the colors of objects and put them in the basket with the appropriate color.

When he began to teach Simon, the researchers would ask him, “Simon, can you hear me?,” And Simon responded to that question by saying, “Yes.” Furthermore, the research team asked Simon to learn a task that will be done to complete.

Thomaz revealed, one of the biggest challenges in developing Simon is designing the system integration. “We use the Open CV (Open Source Computer Vision) and a voice recognition system,” he said.

He added that Simon was also able to recognize faces and sound localization. Currently, it is only waist part of Simon’s body available. There behind a bank of four computer monitors that show various information about the status of the robot. Its developers say, until now they were not planning to commercialize Simon.

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