Technologies

• Flakey, SRI's mobile robot
• Mobile robot controller
• PRS-Lite reactive planner (a version of PRS-CL with a 100 milliseconds cycle time)
• DECIPHER continuous speech recognition technology
• Stereo image analysis

Alan Alda Visits Flakey the Robot

A production team from the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers visited SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, May 4, 1994, to film Flakey, the AIC's mobile robot. Alan Alda, host of the series, was on hand. He and Flakey starred in a script in which Alda first shows Flakey around the halls, identifying various offices along the way, including those of two employees, John and Karen. He also tells him that John knows where Karen is. Later, Alda asks Flakey to go fetch a file from Karen. Flakey troops off to Karen's office, asks if she's there, and hearing no answer, trundles off to John's office. ``John, are you there?,'' Flakey asks. ``Yes,'' replies John. ``Where is Karen?,'' Flakey continues. ``Flakey, she's in the front office.'' Flakey then heads for the front office, but finds an obstacle in its way. He get around the obstacle, completes his trip to the office, finds Karen, asks her for the file, gets it from her, and takes it back to Alda.

In two weeks before the shooting day, Flakey had been taught new tricks. Real-time stereo algorithms were adapted so that Flakey could distinguish and follow people. The DECIPHER speech recognition system was used to give Flakey the ability to respond to spoken commands. These were rapidly integrated with Flakey's established navigational and control techniques via its agent architecture based upon PRS-Lite.

Alan Alda and the producers were delighted with the interactive response of Flakey to visual input, spoken commands, and unexpected events, and tested the system extensively to gauge how well it worked. In one sequence, Alda wondered what would happen if Flakey were to give himself commands. Although it had not been tried before, it was easy enough to do: Flakey was commanded to say ``Flakey, turn left,'' while his microphone was held next to his speaker. He heard his own command, acknowledged it, and turned.

The two hours of material shot on May 4, were distilled into a 6-minute segment, which became part of a special program on ``Life's Big Questions,'' celebrating Scientific American's 100th Anniversary.

Kurt Konolige <konolige@ai.sri.com>
Artificial Intelligence Center
SRI International

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