KASPAR is—-not the friendly ghost; not a mysterious boy found in 19th century Germany with a mysterious story (who is sometimes described in the context of feral children)—but a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. (KASPAR stands for “Kinesics and Synchronisation in Personal Assistant Robotics.”) As noted in the weblog of the American Association for Technology in Psychiatry, KASPAR is being developed as part of the European Robot Cup Project with the intent to “build an open-source robot platform for cognitive development research. The Adaptive Systems Research Group is investigating the …read more

Can androids shine light into the murky world of autism and enable scientists to treat it and other psychiatric disorders?
What can mechanical beings reveal about how we relate to one another as flesh-and-blood creations?
And as these humanlike stand-ins continue to evolve, will they form relationships with us and lay claim to certain moral and legal rights?
You can read all about it in a special issue of Connection Science (December, Vol 18, No 4), co-edited by Karl MacDorman, associate professor at the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, and Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Lab at Osaka …read more