Social
robots. That's pretty much all Dr. Cynthia Breazeal has thought about
for the past 20 years. Not so much how to build a better robot, but how
to build one that could work and live alongside humans. It sounds like a
simple concept, but it’s not; perhaps that is why it has taken her all
these years to finally deliver a consumer product: Jibo, the world’s
first family robot.
Jibo
is a desktop robot making its debut on Indiegogo on Wednesday. At first
glance, Jibo looks like a mashup between a desk lamp and Wall-E’s “EV.”
It has a round base that plugs into a standard AC outlet, a slightly
cone-shaped midsection and a round head with a flat front that sits on
top of it. That dark, round face features a 5.7-inch screen. The design
is attractive, but not necessarily compelling — that is, until Jibo
comes to life.
“Jibo,
please introduce yourself,” Dr. Breazeal says, raising her voice only
slightly. The transformation is startling. Jibo’s face lights up and its
11.5-inch body swivels around to face her. Jibo’s screen shows a large
“blinking” ball (the blink is like the closing of an eye), as it
responds, “Hi, my name is Jibo.”
The
robot then dances to a short tune, moving with an almost startling
suppleness. Jibo’s eye then changes to an image of a large camera lens,
as it explains how it can capture and share special moments while Jibo’s
body reorients itself to face Breazeal. Then it starts to tell a story
and the screen changes again into images for a tale about the three
little pigs. Jibo doesn’t not only reads the story in its friendly, male
voice, but also uses its body to act it out.
Soon,
I was waking up Jibo and putting it to sleep with my own voice commands
(Jibo rotates and puts its “head” down so it’s not constantly awake and
watching). It was fun, but I was hungry for more.
It’s
a prototype that doesn't have all the planned functionality shown in
the Jibo promotional video, which launched with the Indiegogo campaign,
but Breazeal’s intention is clear: Jibo isn't an appliance, it’s a
companion, one that can interact and react with its human owners in ways
that delight instead of disturb. Jibo “supports the human experience,
but does not try to be human.”
While
Jibo is not a mobile robot, it has, Breazeal explained, benefited
greatly from the mobile revolution. Built by a 20-member team with
off-the-shelf mobile components, Jibo will cost $499 (in the Indiegogo
campaign) and $599 for the developer edition (with SDK).
The
relatively consumer-friendly price point comes courtesy of using things
like a mobile CPU and a standard 5.7-inch phablet display, which, of
course, provides the added benefit of a touch screen. As you might
expect, it can take video and pictures (on your command, of course), but
also tracks faces so its “face” can look up at yours. It can even make
sure all faces in the room are in focus before it grabs a group photo.
There
are some more esoteric parts in Jibo like the touch sensors on its head
(“What I found in my research with robots, is that people do
communicate with touch,” Breazeal said), color stereoscopic cameras and a
stereo microphone array (Jibo hears and knows where the sound is coming
from), but perhaps none more so than the three actuators (or motors)
featuring high-resolution encoders and velocity control that give Jibo
its signature moves, including the ability to rotate its head a full 360
degrees. Put simply, this robot does not move like a robot; it’s fluid
and, in fact, animated. That’s not an accident.
Many
of Jibo’s responses are, essentially, animated or choreographed by
Fardad Faridi, an animatronics expert whose been working with Breazeal
at the MIT Media Lab for years. “If there’s one man on the planet who
understands how you animate atoms and not just bits, it’s Fardad,”
Breazeal said. “He’s a brilliant animator and that’s a key part of the
Jibo experience.”
In
the video, Jibo interacts at a dinner table like it’s one of the
guests, switching between displaying the face of a distant family member
communicating via a telepresence app (which will let you tap faces on
it and make Jibo turn its head toward them) and automatically swiveling
to pay attention to someone else speaking nearby it. It moves, in other
words, as one might expect a living thing to.
Breazeal
calls this “attuned reciprocity” It’s the idea of not only paying
attention to visual cues, but responding in a reciprocal or mutual way.
It’s something humans do all the time. Teaching robots to do this is
another matter, but for Breazeal, it’s the key. She called it “a big
‘aha!’ moment in robotics technology. There is, she said, “this idea of
transparency through social cues.” This allows people to predict what
others will do next. Interaction is not just people talking at each
other; “it’s a dance.”
More
importantly, Jibo skirts way, way around the uncanny valley — there’s
little in it that could be confused for a human. “It’s a robot, so let’s
celebrate the fact it’s a robot,” said Breazeal as she explained the
design decisions behind Jibo. Yet it can act in human ways that are
compelling.
For
instance, at one point during my interview, Breazeal mentioned Jibo’s
name and the robot woke up from a slumber, started blinking its one
large orb-like eye and making little sounds. It hears its name and
responded like a person would, but did not startle with some sort of
unanticipated command response.
It had, in other words, a very social reaction, one that we understood and, to some extent, expected.
“Autonomous
robots sends these signals of what psychology calls animacy,” said
Breazeal. “In the world of entities, our minds have different ways,
different psychology when you think of things that are governed by
having states of mind and things that are governed by the laws of
physics.”
The
way a thing moves actually triggers something in our mind that makes us
perceive it as living. It’s the difference between a person climbing up
a hill, against the force of gravity, and a ball that’s rolling down a
hill because gravity is pulling it.
Understand
that this is how people tell the difference between sentient beings and
objects means asking yourself how to create a social robot that, in
essence, doesn’t break these rules. “How does a robot reveal its
internal states in a way that we intuitively understand?” said Breazeal.
As
Breazeal explains the science behind Jibo, she becomes increasingly
animated. I’ve seen her this way before, when she joined me for a
robotics panel in 2004.
Back
then she was still an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab working on a social
robot that now appears to presage Jibo. Called Leonardo and co-designed
by the late special effects master Stan Winston, it looked like
“Mogwai” from the 1980s film Gremlins.
Like
Jibo, Leonardo was a social robot (its predecessor, Kismet, was
considered the real breakthrough in social robotics), though he lived
only in MIT’s Media lab and we only saw it on video. The robot had large
eyes and reacted and responded to human social cues. Unlike Jibo, it
appeared to learn new skills on the fly.
Breazeal
wasn’t, in 2004, talking about consumer robots, she simply wanted to
learn how humans and robotics could interact. And though we talked on
and off throughout the years, there was little indication that she would
follow in the footsteps of fellow MIT alum and iRobot CEO Colin Angle
who brought us the Roomba or her mentor Rodney Brooks, who launched
Rethink Robotics Baxter.
So
Jibo comes as a welcome surprise, and while it’s more purely consumer
and interactive than iRobot’s Roomba and Rethink’s Baxter, Jibo will, as
“the first social robotics platform” be, like those other robots,
connected, extensible and ever-changing.
Jibo is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi (Bluetooth hardware is included, but not yet being used) and will benefit from a cloud-based update system. The SDK will allow third parties to build new tools that work with Jibo and utilize some of its scripts to build custom interactions.
Jibo is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi (Bluetooth hardware is included, but not yet being used) and will benefit from a cloud-based update system. The SDK will allow third parties to build new tools that work with Jibo and utilize some of its scripts to build custom interactions.
Speaking
of scripts,Jibo runs on Linux and is programmed in JavaScript, which
should make the act of introducing new responses pretty easy. Breazeal
said there will even be, in the $499 consumer edition, some
customizability. Owners will be able to create and upload their own
emoticons which will appear onscreen. (Prices after the campaign could
be higher. Breazeal expects it to be priced in the range of a high-end
tablet.)
Jibo’s
extensibility ties directly back to the Indiegogo campaign, which
Breazeal insists is not so much about raising money to make Jibo
possible (“We have backers”), but to build the developer and user
community and inspire people to build apps for Jibo. They’re also doing a
“self-starter” campaign on MyJibo.com. Both will result in a limited
run output of the robot. “We want to engage our community with people
who want to make Jibo part of their lives [and] with people who want to
develop for Jibo early enough in our development cycle that we can
really engage them and get their input and feedback.” said Breazeal.
For
a first-of-its-kind platform like this, Breazeal expects what she calls
“fast followers,” but “if you can really get that awesome developer
community, you’re gonna win.”
The
future Jibo, which was not functional during our demo, will be smaller
and lighter than the prototype. It will also be all white. While
Breazeal joked that she would be happy to see people buy multiple
robots, but the use case will likely be that they buy multiple charging
bases and then move Jibo from room-to-room. It does have on-board
batteries and can operate for about 30 minutes on DC power.
When
you bring Jibo home, it will guide you through getting it on your Wi-Fi
network and will do everything it can to get to know you, starting by
registering your face and voice, asking you a few questions and
explaining what it can do for you.
Depending
on how attached you become top Jibo, you may not want to leave it
behind when you walk out your front door. For that, Breazeal says
they’ll have iOS and Android apps so you can “have Jibo with you”
wherever you go. Those apps will also let you communicate through
connected Jibo’s via voice and messaging.
Breazeal’s
video envisions a version that can greet you when you arrive home,
check and read your Gmail to you, ask you if you want dinner, order
pizza and even turn on the lights when you walk in the door. “We know
tech has to step in and empower us in the home,” said Breazeal.
Jibo’s
functionality, though, will be somewhat limited when it launches next
year (development versions arrive in Q3, 2015). There is, she noted, a
release schedule for some of these skills, which will be built on top of
the core “social robot” platform. Others, however, like the robot
ordering pizza, are really designed to excite the developer community,
“Imagine what Jibo would be like to be the new humanized interface of
the connected home.”
The
adorable bot may not be alone in the world of human-friendly home
robots. Its unveiling comes just months after Softbank introduced
Pepper, the emotional robot. There are, of course, some stark
differences. Pepper is over 3 feet all, while Jibo is just under a foot
and weighs just 6 pounds. Where Jibo is an armless desk or table-bound
robot, Pepper has arms, expressive hands and can roll about on a
3-wheeled base.
Built
by Alderbaran and Foxconn and bankrolled by Softbank, Pepper is
expected to cost roughly $2,000, which makes it considerably more
expensive than Jibo.
Each of these robots though share similar aims: To connect with people, provide companionship, care and support.
The
elderly could rely on Jibo and Pepper to watch over them and react if
they fall ill. They’re designed to provide companionship to old and
young. Both Jibo and Pepper appear to be adept story tellers.
Researchers
“have found that people actually do better they have better outcomes
with social robots that are physically instantiated in the social
environment, than flat screens and other technologies,” said Breazeal.
There
will be a growing need for robots like Jibo, said Breazeal, “as the
demand of things like aging in place, chronic disease management and
early childhood learning, the demand is exceeding the human
institutional ability to meet that need and it’s just projected to get
worse over time.”
“We know technology has to step in, we know technology has to empower us in the home,” she said.
Is Jibo that home-based technology? It’s soon soon to tell.
Posted by : Gizmeon
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