Kismet

Kismet is a seminal example of a social robot, developed by Cynthia Breazeal and team at MIT Media Lab in the late 1990's. Kismet is a pre-verbal child bot that interacts with humans primarily through emotions.

Kismet combines basic emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, joy, sorrow, and surprise with a motivational system of drives and needs that it tries to keep in balance. For example, if there is no one nearby it will get bored, if it sees someone it responds enthusiastically, in an effort to draw them in, but if people would get to close it would get scared.

Interestingly, Kismet relies on only some very simple principles to make it a believable social robot. For example, it implements a basic concept of turn-taking to give humans the feeling of being in a dialog. Also, by pointing its direction of gaze towards movement in its field of view it makes us feel that it is conscious of its surroundings.