Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.

Copyright

MIT Media Lab / Personal Robots group

Personal Robots group

Group Contact:
Archived
Project Research

Intersectionality + Data Storytelling

By exploring intersectionality as a concept and as a practice, students use data storytelling to understand their lives and experiences.&nb…
Archived
Project Research

Robot Companion for Better Wellbeing

Globally, depression affects more than 264 million people of all ages, and is a leading cause of disability worldwide. Several interactive …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

ZoomADay - AI Synthesized Characters

#ZoomADay was a year long project exploring the creation and use of synthetic characters and deep fakes for use in online telepresence and …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language and …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Primary School AI Education

This Primary School AI curriculum introduces elementary school children to robotics and artificial intelligence. Throughout the curriculum,…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Migratable AI

We live in a world of personified conversational assistants (agents). We interact with these agents in our daily lives such as smart speake…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Machine Behavior

Machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic, and …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Positive Psychology Coach for College Students

A significant number of college students suffer from mental health issues that impact their physical, social, and occupa…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

The role of social robots in fostering human empathy

Empathy is a core human skill. From early stages of our lives, being able to understand and behave with empathy is fundamental to our socia…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Social Robots in Space: Initial Explorations

Can we enable social connectivity between astronauts and people on Earth through an embodied agent?Astronauts actively communicate with the…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Predicting Trust Between People

Machine learning model outperforms human judgementOur computational trust model is capable of predicting—above human accuracy—the degree of…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

Unconventional mixing of research fields introduces a new method to study human behavior using social robots.
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use of…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Huggable: A social robot for pediatric care

The Huggable is a new type of robotic companion for health care, education, and social communication applications. The Huggable is much mor…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robot Expressiveness Affects Children's Learning

Prior research with preschool children has established that book reading, especially when children are encouraged to actively process the s…
Archived
Project Research

Cognimates: collaborative creative learning with embodied intelligent agents

Conversational agents and intelligent toys are present in children's homes and influence their development. The introduction of these devic…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Children Use Nonverbal Cues to Learn from Robots

When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientation,…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Social Robot Toolkit

The Social Robot Toolkit aims to provide a platform for children to learn through playful interaction. The social robot (Soro) toolkit allo…
Archived
Project Research

Electric Parrot

Can you feel empathy for a robot? The electric parrot project is about designing a robot that can engender empathy. For this we are constru…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Interactive Journaling

We developed a smartphone application that detects users’ affect and provides personalized positive psychology interventions in order to en…
Archived
Project Research

SHARE: Understanding and Manipulating Attention Using Social Robots

SHARE is a robotic cognitive architecture focused on manipulating and understanding the phenomenon of shared attention during interaction. …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Curious Social Robot

Can robots learn to be social? Can they do that in a structured way? This project uses the DragonBot platform and state-of-the-art artifici…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Social Robot as a Younger Curious Peer

One of the most fundamental and important characteristics of children is their curiosity. Can an interaction with a robot elicit, guide, an…
Archived
Project Research

PANDA: Parental Affective Natural Driver Assistant

Drivers spend a significant amount of time multi-tasking while they are behind the wheel, especially parent drivers that attend to child pa…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children from…
Archived
Project Research

Animal-Robot Interaction

Like people, dogs and cats live among technologies that affect their lives. Yet little of this technology has been designed with pets in mi…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robot Learning from Human-Generated Rewards

To serve us well, robots and other agents must understand our needs and how to fulfill them. To that end, our research develops robots that…
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Socially Assistive Robotics: An NSF Expedition in Computing

Our mission is to develop the computational techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of "relational" robots, …
Archived
Project Research

Mind-Theoretic Planning for Robots

Mind-Theoretic Planning (MTP) is a technique for robots to plan in social domains. This system takes into account probability distributions…
Archived
Project Research

DragonBot: Android Phone Robots for Long-Term HRI

DragonBot is a new platform built to support long-term interactions between children and robots. The robot runs entirely on an Android cell…
Archived
Project Research

Cloud-HRI

Imagine opening your eyes and being awake for only half an hour at a time. This is the life that robots traditionally live. This is due to …
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and con…
Archived
Project Research

TinkRBook: Reinventing the Reading Primer

TinkRBook is a storytelling system that introduces a new concept of reading, called textual tinkerability. Textual tinkerability uses story…
Archived
Project Research

AIDA: Affective Intelligent Driving Agent

Drivers spend a significant amount of time multi-tasking while they are behind the wheel. These dangerous behaviors, particularly texting w…
Archived
Project Research

LightSwarm

LightSwarm is a platform for interaction between humans and swarm robots. Swarm robots are implemented as augmented-reality agents that com…
Archived
Project Research

Magician-Robot Interaction

Can a robot and magician collaborate on stage to create a believable, evocative performance? Close human-robot proximity and coordination o…
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Textiles

We are investigating e-textiles and fiber-electronics to develop unique soft-architecture robotic components. We have been developing large…
Archived
Project Research

The Helping Hands

Two robot arms are in constant motion and hard at work. From a distance, they can be seen considering their tasks, communicating with each …
Archived
Project Research

Zipperbot: Robotic Continuous Closure for Fabric Edge Joining

In robotics, the emerging field of electronic textiles and fiber-electronics represents a shift in morphology from hard and rigid mechatron…
Archived
Project Research

Storytelling in the Preschool of the Future

Using the Preschool of the Future environment, children can create stories that come to life in the real world. We are developing interface…
Archived
Project Research

MDS: Exploring the Dynamics of Human-Robot Collaboration

As robots become more and more capable, we will begin to invite them into our daily lives. There have been few examples of mobile robots ab…
Archived
Project Research

MDS: Crowdsourcing Human-Robot Interaction: Online Game to Study Collaborative Human Behavior

Many new applications for robots require them to work alongside people as capable members of human-robot teams. We have developed Mars Esc…
Archived
Project Research

originalMachines

The digital revolution has fundamentally changed our lives. Multimedia content-creation tools allow us to instantiate and share ideas easil…
Archived
Project Research

I/O Stickers

I/O Stickers is an electronics construction kit made up of adhesive sensors and actuators. Users can place these special electronic sticker…
Archived
Project Research

TeleScrapbook and TelePostcard

TeleScrapbook and TelePostcard are pairs of wirelessly connected electronic scrapbooks and electronic greeting cards, respectively. These e…
Archived
Project Research

The Alphabots

The Alphabots are trans-fictional(xF) mobile and modular semi-autonomous robotic symbol set characters designed to play with preschool aged…
Archived
Project Research

NeverEnding Drawing Machine

Inspired by the Surrealists' Exquisite Corpse art game, the NeverEnding Drawing project is one of several applications developed on a scala…
Archived
Project Research

3DprintedClock

The 3DprintedClock project is the result of ready-assembled 3D printed computational mechanisms, and is related to research in the fields o…
Archived
Project Research

Operobots: A Robotic Swarm for Artistic Expression

We are studying and implementing a swarm of 36 holonomic-drive robots for use in an upcoming robotic opera. Each robot will eventually comp…
Archived
Project Research

C5: Development and Learning

C5 is our fourth-generation behavior architecture. It has been re-architected and fully documented. Our intention is to use C5 as a toolkit…
Archived