Kaspar

History

In 2005 University of Hertfordshire professors Kerstin Dautenhahn and Chrystopher Nehaniv led a small team to design a robot head for an experiment on how humans perceive robot faces. Not long after, a humanoid body was created under the supervision of Dr. Michael L. Walters. The researchers combined the robot head and body and the child-sized humanoid Kaspar was born. With contributions from other researchers of the Adaptive Systems research group, Kaspar has been used in human-robot interaction studies and for robot-assisted therapy for children with autism (work supervised by Dr. Ben Robins and Prof. Dautenhahn). While Kaspar's face may seem "creepy" to many people, children are generally interested in interacting with the robot, whose simplicity of features and movements provides a safe, non-threatening, nonjudgmental mediator for encouraging social interaction.