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Kismet
Kismet
Last updated: September 2, 2026
Locomotion Type
Hybrid
Stage
Demo
Height
38 cm
Degrees of Freedom
21 DOF
Weight
7 kg
Price
$26,087
Release Year
1997
Computing
Four Motorola 68332 microprocessors, nine networked 400 MHz PCs, dual 450 MHz PC running NT, and 500 MHz PC running Linux. 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.
Sensors
Four digital cameras, three microphones, 21 encoders.
Kismet is a pioneering affective social robot head developed at MIT AI Lab by Cynthia Breazeal in the late 1990s. It expresses emotions through facial features (eyes, eyebrows, ears, mouth) and vocalizations, driven by an architecture modeling drives and emotions, and is a landmark platform in social robotics.
Application Scenarios
Social robotics, human-robot interaction and affective computing research.
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