The MERTZ speaking robot is a research study at MIT University involving the social interaction of robots. The MERTZ is an active vision head robot, designed for exploring scalable learning in a social context. MERTZ is designed to be placed in public places for long periods of time and continually interact with people. The intent is to have the robot slowly learn about various correlations of objects and people. The robot may even learn to correlate objects and people with frequently uttered phoneme sequences, differentiate among people and their interaction habits, and learn to dislike some people who tend to annoy the robot. This is a very harmless robot that is more humorous than anything. From what we see here, it appears to get confused easily. I’d love to greet it myself, it even displays human-like emotions.
MERTZ: An active vision head robot for exploring social learning