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MIT Media Lab / Personal Robots group

Personal Robots group

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Project Research

Data Activism Program

Thank you for your interest in our  Data Activism program. All available spots for this program have been filled. If you would li…
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AI Ethics Literacy

An essential element of K-12 AI literacy is educating learners about the ethical and societal implications of AI systems. Previous work in …
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Intersectionality + Data Storytelling

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

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language and …
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Primary School AI Education

This Primary School AI curriculum introduces elementary school children to robotics and artificial intelligence. Throughout the curriculum,…
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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…
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PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
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Machine Behavior

Machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic, and …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!
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Predicting Trust Between People

Machine learning model outperforms human judgementOur computational trust model is capable of predicting—above human accuracy—the degree of…
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Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
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Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
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Human-Robot Trust

Unconventional mixing of research fields introduces a new method to study human behavior using social robots.
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Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use of…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Interactive Journaling

We developed a smartphone application that detects users’ affect and provides personalized positive psychology interventions in order to en…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children from…
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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…
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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…
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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, …
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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…
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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…
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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 …
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Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and con…
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TinkRBook: Reinventing the Reading Primer

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

LightSwarm is a platform for interaction between humans and swarm robots. Swarm robots are implemented as augmented-reality agents that com…
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Magician-Robot Interaction

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

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

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

TeleScrapbook and TelePostcard are pairs of wirelessly connected electronic scrapbooks and electronic greeting cards, respectively. These e…
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The Alphabots

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

Inspired by the Surrealists' Exquisite Corpse art game, the NeverEnding Drawing project is one of several applications developed on a scala…
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3DprintedClock

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