ii-1 Campus Guide Bot
November 2nd, 2009
This bot resembles a modern trash can with eyes, but don’t throw your garbage in him. This one is from Kobe’s Konan University Faculty of Intelligence and Informatics. They have created a guide robot that communicates with natural language. Using a database from the campus website, the ii-1 can answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ questions, but he can also reply to those who ask ‘why’ and ‘who’ using Julius open source speech synthesis software. He’s autonomous too, so can move around and avoid obstacles.
Professor Hirotaka Nakayama and his team plan to give it facial expression recognition to make it look more human friendly and less like a rolling dildo.
