Kismet

Close-up of a robot with an aluminum frame and cartoonish, friendly parts that give it a personality, including a flexible red mouth, plastic eyeballs, fake eyebrows and eyelids, and pink paper folded to look like ears.
Kismet is happy. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

Kismet was one of the first robots able to demonstrate social and emotional interactions with humans. It had a cartoonish face, spoke with a squeaky baby voice, and could always make people smile.

Creator

MIT

Year
1998
Country
United States 🇺🇸
Categories
Features
Kismet shows its emotions. Video: MIT

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Overall Rating

Average Rating: 2.9 stars (1,660 ratings)

Current Ranking: #227 top rated

Would you want this robot?

36% said yes (1,821 ratings)

Current Ranking: #226 most wanted

Appearance

Neutral

Most rated "Somewhat Creepy" (4,011 ratings)

Current Ranking: #15 creepiest

Did you know?

Kismet, like you, has personal space, and it gets uncomfortable when people get too close to it.

Close-up of the robot's face. It's lips and eyes are contorted in a way that mimics disgust.
Kismet is not happy. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

History

Kismet is an expressive robot head designed by Cynthia Breazeal, then a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. The project was an early experiment in affective computing and social robotics. Kismet could display a range of emotions: calm, angry, disgust, interest, sad, happy, surprise. The name Kismet comes from a Turkish word meaning "fate" or sometimes "luck". Kismet currently resides at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Mass. Breazeal is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Close-up of the robot's face. It's lips and eyes are contorted in a way that mimics fear or shock.
Kismet is scared!! Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source
A smiling woman shows the robot its own smiling reflection.
A moment of reflection. Photo: Peter Menzel/Science Source

Specs

Overview

Can perceive a variety of social cues and display emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, calmness, surprise, disgust, tiredness, and the state of sleep).

Status

Inactive

Year

1998

Website
Height
38 cm
Weight
7 kg
Sensors

Four digital cameras, three microphones, 21 encoders.

Actuators

Maxon DC servomotors

Degrees of Freedom (DoF)
21 (Eyes: 3 DoF; Neck: 3 DoF; Ear: 2 DoF x 2; Eyelid: 1 DoF x 2; Lip: 4 DoF; Jaw: 1 DoF; Eyebrow: 2 DoF x 2)
Materials

Aluminum frame

Compute

Four Motorola 68332 microprocessors, nine networked 400 MHz PCs, dual 450 MHz PC running NT, and 500 MHz PC running Linux.

Software

High-level perception system, motivation system, behavior system, motor skill system, and face motor system coded in L, a multi-threaded Lisp. Plus QNX real-time operating system, DECtalk voice synthesizer, and speech processing package developed at MIT by the Spoken Language Systems Group.

Power

External power supply

Cost
$25,000 (hardware only)