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I studied Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and its application in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Facial Feature Analysis for Humanoid Robots

This study explores how human social response toward the robot can change when we vary the number of the active degrees of freedom in the robot's head and face area. We investigate this problem by conducting two user studies that situate a person in a dialogue where the puppeteered robot asks personal questions. We compared the robot with varying degrees of freedom in the robot's neck and face area with the elderly population. The study was conducted in five different senior centers around the Greater Boston Area.

J. K. Lee and C. Breazeal (2010), "Human Social Response toward Humanoid Robot's Head and Facial Features," in Work-In-Progress in the Extended Abstract of CHI 2010, April 10-15, 2010, Atlanta, GA.
Lee, H., Ota, Y., Breazeal, C., and Lee, J. K., “Methods of robot behavior generation and robots utilizing the same”, U.S. Patent, 8,751,042, Filed in Dec, 2011, and Issued in Jun, 2014.

Affordable Avatar Control System for Personal Robots

Social robots (personal robots) emphasize individualized social interaction and communication with people. To maximize communication capacity of a personal robot, designers make it more anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic), and people tend to interact more naturally with such robots. However, adapting anthropomorphism (or zoomorphism) in social robots makes morphology of a robot more complex; thus, it becomes harder to control robots with existing interfaces. The Huggable is a robotic Teddy bear platform developed by the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. It has its specific purpose in healthcare, elderly care, education, and family communication. It is important that a user can successfully convey the meaningful context in a dialogue via the robot's puppeteering interface. I investigate relevant technologies to develop a robotic puppetry system for a zoomorphic personal robot and develop three different puppeteering interfaces to control the robot: the website interface, wearable interface, and sympathetic interface. The wearable interface was examined through a performance test and the web interface was examined through a user study.

Please visit the group's webpage (click!) for details and demo videos

J. K. Lee, W. D. Stiehl, R. Toscano, C. Breazeal (2009) "Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar as a Medium for Family Communication and Education," Advanced Robotics, Vol. 23(14), pp 1925- 1945.
W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, C. Breazeal, M. Nalin, A. Morandi, and A. Sanna (2009) "The Huggable: A Platform for Research in Robotic Companions for Pediatric Care," in Workshop on Creative Interactive Play for Disabled Children held at the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC2009) Como, Italy
W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, and C. Breazeal (2009), "The Huggable Project: Building a Personal Robotic Companion System For Healthcare, Education, Family Communication, and Entertainment", In CHI 2009 Workshop on The Reign of Catz and Dogz.
J. K. Lee (2009), "Affordable Avatar Control System for Personal Robots", Master's Thesis, Massacchusetts Institute of Technology.
W. D. Stiehl, J. K. Lee, R. Toscano, and C. Breazeal (2008), "The Huggable: A Platform for Research in Robotic Companions for Eldercare", presented at AAAI Fall Symposium on AI in Eldercare, Washington, D.C., 2008.
J. K. Lee, R. L. Toscano, W. D. Stiehl and C. Breazeal (2008), "The Design of a Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar for Family Communication and Education", Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).
Stiehl, W. D., Breazeal, C., Lee, J. K., Maymin, A. Z., Knight, H., Toscano, R., and Cheung, I. M., “Interactive Systems Employing Robotic Companions”, U.S. Patent, 8,909,370, Filed in May, 2008, and Issued in Dec, 2014.

Smartband: Intelligent Counting System for Repetitive Exercises

As motions sesnors become smaller and less expensive with MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) technology, personal electronic devices are now equipped with a variety of motion sensors such as accelerometers and gyrometers. The application areas include measurement in sports activities, cellphones, and GPS devices. For example, Nike plus tracks your time, distance, pace, and calories as you run or walk.
As a measurement tool for sports activities, Smartband aims to measure repetitive exercises people do daily. Such exercises include push-ups, sit-ups, dumbbell lifting, and other gym exercises. Smartband uses a three-axis accelerometer to measure angular differences in a wrist and an upper arm joints to count those exercises.

Classes

Subject Name	Instructors
Human Robot Interaction	Prof. Cynthia Breazeal
Pattern Recognition	Prof. Rosalind Picard
Autism Theory and Technology	Prof. Sherry Turkle, Prof. Rosalind Picard, and Prof. Cynthia Breazeal with Dr. Rana El Kaliouby
Sensor Systems for Interactive Environments	Prof. Joe Paradiso