ROBOT THE PUBLIC ANEMONE ROBOT WITHOUT ITS SILICONE SKIN

ENTERTAINMENT ROBOTICS MIGHT BE VIEWED as a relatively new field, but the idea of building lifelike machines that entertain has fascinated humans for at least the past five hundreds of years—certainly as far back as 1515 when Leonardo da Vinci (commissioned by the Medici) built an ingenious self-propelled walking mechanical lion that opened and presented its breast full of lilies to Francis I, King of France, as a token of friendship from the Medici. The practice of creating mechanical automata blossomed in the 16th century when mechanical clock makers in Western Europe began to extend their craft to building mechanical animals. The 18th century craze also in Western Europe for animated objects produced a number of impressive mechanical humanoid automata, including the Jaquet-Droz Writer that emulated a young boy writing a letter at his desk and Joseph Faber's Euphonia, a mechanical talking head an operator could reputedly make speak in several European languages. Some of the best-known examples of modern entertainment robots include anima-tronics in theme parks performing fully automated (though fixed and noninteractive) routines and puppeteered animatronics performing with human actors in such Holly-wood movies as Jurassic Park (the dinosaurs) and A.I. (Teddy). The most sophisticated are designed to look like living creatures and perform highly expressive movements. Less well-known examples include live performance troupes in which remote-controlled robots play a part in theatrical performances—either with human actors, as in Omnicircus (www.omnicircus.com), and with other robots, as in the robotic spectacles of Survival Research Laboratories (www.srl.org) The field of entertainment robotics continues to find new applications as increasingly sophisticated and lifelike autonomous robotic technologies mature. Whereas complex animatronic robots are often not designed to walk, small mobile robots (such as the Ullanta performance robotics [12] and the Carnegie-Mellon robot Improv) with built-in navigational skills have been used in live performances [12]. A number of university projects have explored the use of speech recognition and dialogue systems to allow people to have simple verbal interactions with animatronics [6] and mobile robot performers to have simple " improvisational " dialogues [3]. New tools for managing real-time interactive show control [6, 10], authoring nonlinear narrative, and capturing puppeteer