Keepon the Robot Interacts without the Overload

Published March 06, 2009 @ 09:31AM PT

Hideki Kozima and Marek Michalowski (programmer) are creators of the robot Keepon, which has danced to Spoon in an outrageously popular YouTube (below), reprised in a professionally produced film on Wired's dollar, and, yes, has worked for years in autism research and therapy. Keepon is a simplified robot specialized in nonverbal social behavior, developed for interaction with (all) children.

Keepon takes in some ways the opposite approach of Transporters (also, here)--it reduces and simplifies, removing the alarming complexity of a human face and distilling nonverbal social behaviors down to their most basic level. Keepon's design deliberately avoids the uncanny valley problem that made me find Transporters so frightening, which Michalowski discusses specifically in the Post-Gazette article with his comparison between the greater popularity of cartoony CG over photorealistic CG in movies.

More fascinating--and exciting--to me though was looking over some of the actual papers published by Kozima on Keepon's interactions with autistic toddlers as the toddlers began engaging in spontaneous social interactions with the robot. From Social interaction facilitated by a minimally-designed robot: Findings from longitudinal therapeutic practices for autistic children,

Our major claims are (1) simple robots with minimal and comprehensive expressiveness facilitate the spontaneous exchange of mental states in autistic children, (2) autistic children therefore possess the motivation for this mental exchange, and (3) the major social difficulties that autistic children generally suffer from would rather stem from the difficulty in sifting out socially meaningful information (e.g., attention and emotions) from vast incoming perceptual information.

In other words, the results of the Keepon study suggest that autistic people aren't lacking the ability to comprehend other minds or without social capacity or motivation as some theories suggest, but are having difficulty making sense of the intensely complex wash of social information found in more human social partners. This idea is actually completely consistent with my own experience of trying to manage social interactions--in my language, they are always "too bright."

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Comments (10)

Y'know, I was thinking when I was reading the most recent post about The Transporters... I honestly think WALL-E could be useful in teaching kids about emotion. Which is funny, since WALL-E barely even has a face... just a pair of binoculars.

Posted by Cody Boisclair on 03/06/2009 @ 09:59AM PT
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This is veering dangerously close to OT, but I found WALL-E's non-verbal communication (including emotional expression) far easier to understand than most verbal expression and human actors in movies. I really appreciated a character that didn't demand much verbal processing to understand.

Posted by Dora Raymaker on 03/06/2009 @ 11:34AM PT
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I totally agree with you! My son (who has a autism dx) absolutely loves the movie WALL-E. He's had such a profound interest in it, that he even has pointed out to us some of the little things that have gone unnoticed to us. For example, there is the scene where Wall-E leaves to outer space & his roach friend gets left behind. He would get very stressed out over that, till eventually we realized he was crying because the roach was left behind. He got to the point where he would scream "NO" in that scene & reach to the TV monitor. That was huge for us! For him to "feel bad" for the roach. Ironically, it was his uncle, who we think he has gone undiagnosed with Aspergers, who was adamant about wanting to take him to see it in the theater. He claims its one of his favorite movies. My kid doesn't see it as often anymore, however the character remains his favorite.

Posted by Yesenia R on 03/06/2009 @ 04:19PM PT
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It's a little OT, but have you tried either of the facial recognition training programs referred to on this page?

http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/computers.html

Posted by Natasha Chart on 03/06/2009 @ 10:24AM PT
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No, but I have to confess here I have a fundemental disagreement with the theories such programs are based on and therefore large lack of interest. (don't flame me! :-)

Posted by Dora Raymaker on 03/06/2009 @ 10:57AM PT
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My daughter is profoundly autistic. When she was very little and resisted most communication, she and I interacted very well on one level. It involved her having to study my face. I'd give her French fries and say, "I'm hungry." She would carefully watch to make sure I was ready. Then she'd gently and accurately feed me a French fry. I don't understand what this means about an autistic brain but I thought I'd mention it.

Posted by B B on 03/06/2009 @ 10:43PM PT
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I love keepon!

I have a mild auditory processing disorder- I have trouble filtering out background noise. My brain can't pick out that I just need to focus on listening to the person I am talking to, and instead jumbles everything together. I have to either have it simplified by going to a quieter area or be able to see the person so I can pick up on nonverbal cues (when I was little I learned to make very good eye contact, because it helped me hear and understand the teacher). Because my (again, very mild) sensory processing issues are primarily auditory, I have very little difficulty picking up on visual cues.

Anyway, I'm not autistic, but I would imagine that ASDs would be something like auditory processing disorder, except encompassing more areas. Chris is funny, he picks up on the smallest details but misses the big picture. When he talks about his school day he doesn't say "Today I played in the toy kitchen". Instead he says "the eggs are in the toy refrigerator". Which is how I learned his school had a play kitchen... I'm not sure what else it has beyond toy eggs and a refrigerator, though!

Posted by Erin Monk on 03/06/2009 @ 11:26PM PT
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I really relate to the toy kitchen story! For me, I typically have the big picture conceptually just fine but I don't understand well which details about that big picture are salient to communicate. So I'll say something like "I washed the sink" instead of what was important which is "I got sick and threw up in the sink." I understood all of the connected bits of the situation as a whole, but picked the wrong ones to actually give to another person.

Re. your APD analogy, I also have mild APD and I would have to say YES, imagine the same difficulty sorting the foreground from the background or sorting meanings from what is perceived in other areas and that is quite like my experience.

Thanks for your comment!

Posted by Dora Raymaker on 03/07/2009 @ 12:28PM PT
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I love the way Keepon dances! :D

Keepon is something I'd like to hug (depending on the materials used...) because it doesn't look real, but to me it does look like a baby bird.

I dislike stuffed animals that look too real, I only like them if they're stylised or with stunted limbs etc, otherwise they frighten me (or they have to be very small). I also don't like dolls, except if they're like these: http://www.frutsel.nl/voorbeelden.html (bottom right). And I dislike having posters of people's heads (like celebrities) if they're looking 'at you'.

I love Wall-E, but then I love most animation films. Wall-E is in my top-10 though.

Posted by Norah vd Stel on 03/07/2009 @ 02:03PM PT
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I have always found dolls very frightening, especially baby dolls that look like actual babies. They look too much like something that is supposed to be warm and alive, yet they are cold and umoving *shiver*

Posted by Dora Raymaker on 03/07/2009 @ 03:06PM PT
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Dora is committed to improving quality of life for individuals on the autistic spectrum--including herself! She is Co-director of the Academic Autistic Spectrum Partnership in Research and Education and a member of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network's Board of Directors.