Very much like a "hey mom, look at me do this" scenario, Georgia Tech's humanoid robot "Simon" is now being used to get people's attention. In the further efforts to integrate robots into society, professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Aaron Bobick had this to say. "The primary focus was trying to give Simon, our robot, the ability to understand when a human being seems to be reacting appropriately, or in some sense is interested now in a response with respect to Simon and to be able to do it using a visual medium, a camera... Simon would make some form of a gesture, or some form of an action when the user was present, and the computer vision task was to try to determine whether or not you had captured the attention of the human being."
He goes on, "We would like to bring robots into the human world. That means they have to engage with human beings, and human beings have an expectation of being engaged in a way similar to the way other human beings would engage with them."
At the moment, Simon is about 80% accurate in detecting attention. Which is better than a child getting their parents attention.
See more at Georgia Tech.
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