14 DAY TRIAL // Tired of coming home from work to an empty nest? You probably need a robot to make your home more welcoming.
Companion robots are not news anymore, but iCat completes their repertoire with something special: an expressive face.
Icat is a robot that interacts with the user. It was designed by Philips Research (Eindhoven, the Netherlands) for studying intelligent behavior and social interaction styles in a home. Apparently, it's aimed at developing software technologies for decision making and reasoning.
Tell her to leave, and iCat will look sad. Praise her, and she will shine. Beat her, and she will beat you back using its mechanical tail and eye laser beams (now, that's a lie). iCat understands many languages and it uses internal microscopes in order to record sounds that will help it with the speech recognition process.
The user-interface robot is 38 cm tall and comes with 13 electric motors that control different parts of the face such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position to produce the appropriate emotional response. Moreover, iCat can play TicTacToe with you and, hell, she can even tell dog jokes! A robot telling a joke? Is Philips trying to be funny or what? That's creepy enough to scare any sensitive child.
iCat can also connect to the Internet and display online info on your TV or read it aloud (that's not a lie). One thing she won't do is understand your feelings (but at least, she can pretend). Philips only designed a few prototypes for human-robot interaction research.
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