Servo - January 2008

by David Geer

Contact the author at geercom@alltel.net

Zeno — The First Complete

Character Robot

Human interaction is its main attraction ...

Zeno — due on the market as a toy in 2009 — is the closest thing to human that a robot has become. Its facial expressions are a story all to themselves, enabling the most complete robot personality and human-to-robot emotive interactivity to date. Want some proof? Read on!

Zeno is a 16-inch, six-pound, interactive robot boy developed by Hanson Robotics with help from a number of vendors including RoboGarage and roboticist Tomotaka Takahashi, of Japan, who is responsible for creating Zeno’s body.

The body prototype uses 18 servos, enabling the robot to walk, run, balance on one foot, lie down and get up, and gesture, as in non-verbal communication, according to Dr. David Hanson, PhD, who worked with Takahashi to produce the combined robot, Zeno.

Zeno is Born

Only recently completed (September 2007), Zeno, the boy robot, offers every human facial response. Zeno (animation software from Massive Software and Maya software) is the world’s first “complete character robot,” according to Dr. Hanson.

Complete character means Zeno has facial expressions, walking and gesturing expressions, and conversational capabilities like a complete human being would have.

Zeno smiles, frowns, and gets angry. He looks sad, surprised, and afraid. He can present confusion or concentration as well, according to Dr. Hanson. The mouth moves when Zeno is speaking, the eyelids each work independent of the other, and the eyeballs turn side-to-side, and look up and down.

“In the toy, we intend for the ears

Even from the start, Zeno’s head was more than a hat rack. Here is a shell of Zeno’s head with notes and numbers; a part of the design process.

A clay mock-up of Zeno from the design phase.

to wriggle,” says Dr. Hanson. Zeno can nod, turn, and tilt its head. “These motions can be used expressively, as well as to affect eye contact with people and otherwise look around the robot’s environment,” Dr. Hanson says.

Zeno — like other Hanson character robots — interacts with people with a full range of robotically orchestrated facial expressions and conversation enabled by Hanson’s Artificial Intelligence software and carried out by Hanson’s patented robot mechanics and materials.

Thanks to a company called Sensory, Zeno recognizes and understands human speech, according to Dr. Hanson. Zeno can respond with substantial verbal exchanges.

Not short on words, Zeno’s vocabulary is what scientists like Dr. Hanson call “arbitrarily large” in size, meaning it is more than big enough for the job at hand. “As people talk with the robot, the robot listens especially for words and phrases most pertinent to the recent conversation,” says Dr. Hanson.

Zeno analyzes human speech to get the intent of the conversation. While the robot makes errors in speech recognition 10-20 percent of the time, it can still respond to human commentary, staying on topic, according to Dr. Hanson. This mirrors human exchanges, in which people generally stay on topic but allow conversation to flow and take