We all hoped that by now robots will be serving us in restaurants, hotels, etc. However, all we got is a robot that cleans our pool . Ignoring current market for Robots, recently there has been some interesting development in robotics:   In previous article we discussed Boston  Dynamic Big Dog robot that can be used like a mule to carry load, and now researchers has introduced new functionality to ATR’s robot Robovie that can carry on a conversation with more than one person just like humans.

This new work is going to be presented in HRI2009 conference. The work is a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon University, Japan’s Osaka University and ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratory.

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According to their published paper,  researchers working on this project engaged Robovie in conversation with two and more humans.  They looked into scenarios where the robot will talk to one person and glance to other one, etc.

Results of the experiment showed that the robot talked mostly with the person whom it looked at. Hence, scientists were able to correlate speech to eye gaze which makes the robots more humanlike.

Here is a video of Robovie in action: