ISEK
From ISURC
Contents |
Overview/FAQ
ISEK (Iowa State's Engineering Kid)
ISEK is a collaborative project between the ISURC and the College of Engineering. ISEK was originally developed to be the event check-in and FAQ resource at the 2004 FIRST Lego League Iowa State Tournament. The club designed a 2 degree of freedom robotic head using webcams, servos, phidgets, and miscellaneous structural materials. ISEK even has fiber-optic hair!
What can ISEK do?
ISEK will chat with you and maintain eye contact while you respond. ISEK will get bored if it can’t find anyone to chat with or excited if there are many people around.
What will ISEK do in the future?
We have a lot of plans for ISEK’s future: Create a new body with arms and a torso for ISEK. Design a new head for ISEK so it can show various facial expressions. Train ISEK to interpret human facial expressions and display its own emotions in response. Teach ISEK to learn from its conversations with hu-mans.
What can I do to help?
If you’re interested in any of the following, we’d love your help!
- sociable robots
- artificial intelligence
- machine learning
- cognitive psychology
- linguistics
- computer vision
How does ISEK work?
Vision and Face Tracking System. ISEK’s eyes are off-the-shelf webcams connected to a laptop. The laptop re-ceives images from the webcam and searches them for human faces. Once the software finds a face, it creates a histogram of the colors that make up the face—a color blob. The program then tries to keep the “face” centered in the picture by telling the servos to pan left, right, up, or down.
Conversation System. The conversation program is based on a popular chatbot called ALICE. When you ask ISEK a question or tell it something about yourself, the pro-gram will look through its database of questions to find the best match. It then returns the corresponding response, which is printed to the screen and spoken by the text-to-speech software.
