Qbo Sees Himself
TheCorpora
Qbo (pronounced "cue-bee-oh") is a newish robot designed by
TheCorpora, which in addition to general cuteness boasts some impressive
speech and object recognition abilities. But what happens if you put an
object recognition robot in a position to see...itself?
Vidoe ^__^
Qbo, to its credit, deals with this kind of existential crisis an
awful lot better than I would. After identifying the Linux penguin as
simply "penguin" (Qbo is built on Linux, hence that particular choice of
penguin), Qbo encounters a mirror. "Who is this?" says Qbo's handler,
in a statement that would break the will of a lesser 'bot. After being
told that the image in the mirror is itself, Qbo then utters exactly the
kind of statement we all wish we could say when looking at ourselves in
the mirror: "Oh, this is me. Nice."
According to the Qbo blog,
this is definitely a designed reaction--Qbo was programmed to utter
those phrases when its various shape- and face-recognition tools
identified itself in the mirror. But it's still a curiously touching
moment, and the Qbo folks are working on a few further
developments--namely, autonomous recognition (so Qbo won't have to be
told that the object in the mirror is itself) and a way to distinguish
so if presented with another Qbo, the first won't assume the second is
itself in a mirror.
