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Vikia This project is no longer active. Head: Greg Armstrong Contact: Reid Simmons (reids@cs.cmu.edu) Mailing address: Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Associated centers: VASC, MRTC, SRI, and FRC Associated labs/groups: Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab and Human-Robot Interaction Group For more information, see this project's homepage.

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Project Description

Vikia is the first step towards making robots more acceptable to people.

She has been given a realistic personality, including her own personal history as the first robotic student at Carnegie Mellon University.

She is a robot with a complex and engaging personality, designed for easy and enjoyable communication. This is made possible through high quality speech and visual recognition, a realistic, developing personality and rich, friendly dialogue and appearance.

The robot has a flat-screen monitor which is used to display an animated computer graphics model of a female face. This face lip-syncs any dialogue that the robot says using text-to-speech software and can be programmed to exhibit a variety of facial expressions.

While VIKIA is no longer actively participating in experiments, her hardware and software design are the basis of the GRACE and Valerie projects. These more recent projects build on VIKIA's social abilities to create social robots that are able to attend the AAAI conference and interact with people (GRACE) and function as a receptionist at Carnegie Mellon (Valerie).

Past members

	Name	Title	Email Address
	Greg Armstrong	Senior Research Technician, CS	roboman@andrew.cmu.edu
	Allison Bruce	PhD Student, RI	abruce@andrew.cmu.edu
	Illah Nourbakhsh	Associate Professor	illah@ri.cmu.edu
	Reid Simmons	Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair, RI/CS	reids@cs.cmu.edu