Kismet

Close-up of a robot with an aluminum frame and cartoonish, friendly parts that give it a personality, including a flexible red mouth, plastic eyeballs, fake eyebrows and eyelids, and pink paper folded to look like ears. — Kismet is happy. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

Kismet was one of the first robots able to demonstrate social and emotional interactions with humans. It had a cartoonish face, spoke with a squeaky baby voice, and could always make people smile.

Creator

MIT

Year

1998

Country

United States 🇺🇸

Categories

Features

Did you know?

Kismet, like you, has personal space, and it gets uncomfortable when people get too close to it.

Close-up of the robot's face. It's lips and eyes are contorted in a way that mimics disgust. — Kismet is not happy. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

History

Kismet is an expressive robot head designed by Cynthia Breazeal, then a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. The project was an early experiment in affective computing and social robotics. Kismet could display a range of emotions: calm, angry, disgust, interest, sad, happy, surprise. The name Kismet comes from a Turkish word meaning "fate" or sometimes "luck". Kismet currently resides at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass. Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Close-up of the robot's face. It's lips and eyes are contorted in a way that mimics fear or shock. — Kismet is scared!! Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

A smiling woman shows the robot its own smiling reflection. — A moment of reflection. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

Specs

Overview: Can perceive a variety of social cues and display emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, calmness, surprise, disgust, tiredness, and the state of sleep).
Status: Inactive
Year: 1998
Website: ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/kismet/kismet.html
Height: 38 cm
Weight: 7 kg
Sensors: Four digital cameras, three microphones, 21 encoders.
Actuators: Maxon DC servomotors
Degrees of Freedom (DoF): 21 (Eyes: 3 DoF; Neck: 3 DoF; Ear: 2 DoF x 2; Eyelid: 1 DoF x 2; Lip: 4 DoF; Jaw: 1 DoF; Eyebrow: 2 DoF x 2)
Materials: Aluminum frame
Compute: Four Motorola 68332 microprocessors, nine networked 400 MHz PCs, dual 450 MHz PC running NT, and 500 MHz PC running Linux.
Software: High-level perception system, motivation system, behavior system, motor skill system, and face motor system coded in L, a multi-threaded Lisp. Plus QNX real-time operating system, DECtalk voice synthesizer, and speech processing package developed at MIT by the Spoken Language Systems Group.
Power: External power supply
Cost: $25,000 (hardware only)