Philips' Cool iCat Robot: Reacts to Human Interaction (VIDEO)

Philips’ iCat has 13 electric motors that move the eyes, eyebrows, eyelids, mouth and head to produce various emotional responses.  So now you can have an anthropomorphic cat that won’t smell or rub up against your leg.

The iCat Research Platform is a research platform for studying human-robot interaction. It consists of a user-interface robot called iCat, the Open Platform for Personal Robotics (‘OPPR’) software, and this website for supporting an iCat Research Community.

Project Goal
Our goal is to stimulate Human-Robot Interaction research by building a research community through supporting a common hardware and software platform.

iCat
iCat is a research platform for studying human-robot interaction topics. The robot is 38 cm tall and is equipped with 13 servos that control different parts of the face, such as the eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, mouth and head position. With this setup iCat can generate many different facial expressions - happy, surprise, angry, sad - that are needed to create social human-robot interaction dialogues.

A camera installed in iCat’s head can be used for different computer vision capabilities, such as recognizing objects and faces. Each foot contains a microphone to record sounds, perform speech recognition and to determine the direction of the sound source. A speaker and soundcard are installed to play sounds and speech. Finally, touch sensors and multi-colour LEDs are installed in the feet and ears to sense whether the user touches the robot and to communicate further information encoded by coloured light. For instance, the operation mode of the iCat (e.g. sleeping, awake, busy, listening) can be encoded by the colour of the LEDs in the ears.

Social Intelligence
Various user studies on social intelligence aspects of user-interface robots have been performed in our test facility HomeLab at Philips Research Eindhoven, the Netherlands. HomeLab is a smart home concept with various means to observe the behavior of users. During some of our studies we investigated the perceived personality of the iCat by letting users interact with the iCat during a game setting (TicTacToe) or task setting (programming a VCR). These studies show measurable differences in effectiveness and enjoyability of the tasks the users had to perform, depending on iCat’s personality.

Further Information

iCat & OPPR community site:
+ iCat community website

Press releases:
+ Philips presents intuitive iCat concept for the home

Publications:

A.J.N. van Breemen, iCat: Experimenting with Animabotics, AISB 2005 Creative Robotics Symposium, Hatfield, England, April 2005.
C. Bartneck, J. Reichenbach, A.J.N. van Breemen, In your face, robot! The influence of a character’s embodiment on how users perceive its emotional expressions, Design and Emotion, Ankara, Turkey, 2004.
A.J.N. van Breemen, Animation Engine for Believable Interactive User-Interface Robots, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS2004), Sendai, Japan 2004.
A.J.N. van Breemen, Bringing Robots to Life: Applying principles of animation to robots, CHI2004, Vienna, 2004.