February 11, 2009

MIT ‘Tofu’ Robot has OLED eyes and mimics Disney cartoons

by anoop

A MIT Media Lab graduate student has created a robot that uses circular OLED displays as eyes for enabling new ways to research human-robot social behavior. The new robot named as TOFU because of its stretchy and bouncy actions was based on animation techniques from Disney’s 2D cartoons from the 1950s. According to the creator, this is not used in other bots. The bots are used to study relationships like eye-contact, joint attention, touching, emotion and imitation.

TOFU is made out of a combination of elastic materials and vibrant colors and brightness available in OLED displays so as to offer more lifelike expressions.


[Wired]