Hanson Robotics debuts "Zeno" artificially intelligent robot child

Man creates robo-boy modelled on his own son, is nothing new?

13 September 2007 13:58 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Hanson Robotics has introduced "Zeno", a robot that uses breakthrough artificial intelligence software to get smarter over time.

With vision and decision-making capabilities from Massive Software, Zeno has the ability to navigate, make facial expressions and move his body based on what he sees around him.

Hanson has also created a character engine with speech recognition and conversational AI for language reasoning so that Zeno can recognise and remember both speech, faces, names and interact accordingly.

The robot has 28 built-in servos in its legs, torso, arms and face. He can show emotions with his flexible expressive face and perform stunts with his agile and self-balancing body.

He can lie down, get up to standing, gesture with his arms, smile, make eye contact, open and close his eyes, mouth and much more. Zeno is driven wirelessly by a standard home PC.

Zeno, apparently the namesake and likeness of inventor David Hanson’s son, is being shown as a prototype, with the aim of producing this robot as a mass-market consumer product.

The robot is 17-inch tall, weighs 6lbs and runs on lithium polymer batteries, the body was designed by Japan’s leading robot designer Tomotaka Takahashi.

Full tags

Gadgets, Robots, Hanson Robotics