Interactive Robots As a graduate student, I joined Prof. Cynthia Breazeal as a founding member of the Robotic Life Group at the MIT Media Lab. (She had previously been project manager for the now-famous Kismet at the AI Lab.) As the group's lead electrical enginner, I developed control hardware and software for several interactive robots.

Leonardo Leonardo, a joint project of the Robotic Life Group and Stan Winston Studio, is the most sophisticated expressive humanoid robot in the world today. He has 67 degrees of freedom concealed behind synthetic skin and fur created using the most advanced special effects techniques. (The picture at left shows him with his skin removed, exposing some of his internal mechanisms.) We designed Leo primarily as a platform for research in human-robot interaction and cooperation, though we also use him to develop algorithms for machine vision and smooth motion control, sensors for synthetic skin, and so on.

Public Anemone The Robotic Life Group's first major project was a non-anthropomorphic robot known as Public Anemone, shown living in an interactive terrarium at SIGGRAPH 2003 in San Antonio. The Anemone used machine vision to interact with people around it, and had a silicone skin and graceful quality of motion that gave it a life-like appearance. We have published papers about this work in the Communications of the ACM and in IROS 2003 Proceedings.

Control Systems Much of my time with the group has been spent developing control hardware for our robots, such as this 32-channel package used to drive Leonardo's face and head. This hardware addresses the special motion demands and volume constraints of our robots which existing controllers could not meet. Some of this hardware is discussed in my Masters thesis.