Charismatic robots can now do stand up comedy and respond to the audience

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Heather Knight, also known as Marilyn Monrobot, studies human machine symbiosis and charismatic robots. In addition to her doctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute she runs a stack of interesting projects.

Here is a video of Heather speaking at TED, demonstrating her robot which does stand up comedy. The audience provided live feedback to the robot during its performance, which it used to develop its routine.



I have written a number of times before about emotional robots, for example in the context of aged care and robot pets. The concept of charismatic and culturally aware robots goes somewhat further. Hard to achieve, but absolutely possible.

(Hattip to @jhagel for the link to this excellent presentation by Heather at dorkbot Pittsburgh, which led me to her TED video.)