Misty is a small programmable robot that has been sitting in the UNBC Computer Science lab for about five months. It has touch sensors, a camera that picks up what is going on around it, and little wheels so it can roll around. Everything on it is programmable.
Ramin Kupaei, a Master’s student in Computer Science and Research Assistant at UNBC’s Robotics Lab, gave me a quick rundown when I ran into him on campus. He has a background in Computer Engineering, so he knows his stuff.
Right now, the lab has a Simon Says game running on it. Misty gives you a command, but you only follow it if the robot says “Simon says” first. Sounds easy. It is not.
“The challenge is to be aware and see when the robot says it,” Ramin said. “If the robot doesn’t say ‘Simon says’ and you touch, you lose.”
Misty is not Ramin’s main project. He works mostly on another robot called Qt. Misty is more of a shared lab experiment under Dr. Shruti Chandra, a Computer Science professor at UNBC who focuses on using social robots to improve well-being. The robot showed up at one of her graduate seminars as a fun intro, which is honestly a great way to start a presentation.
No one knows exactly where Misty is going yet. “We are just kind of experimenting,” Ramin said. The bigger goal across all the lab’s robots is getting human-robot interaction to a point where it runs on its own, no researcher babysitting required.
For now though, it plays Simon Says. Go find it.
