You remind me of a friend I just unfollowed on Facebook.
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QRIO's success shows robots don't need to be entirely "life-like" to be successful, Movellan said. QRIO stood only about 2-feet (58 centimeters) tall, and its only resemblance to a human was that it had two hands and walked on two legs. And because speech-recognition technology doesn't work well in noisy environments, QRIO couldn't even talk. "QRIO was kind of like R2-D2 [in "Star Wars"]," Movellan said. "It expressed emotions but not speech." The ability to respond to touch is relatively easy to program into robots, Movellan said. "We had things like computer vision in the robot, and touch was the easiest thing," he said. "And it turned out to be the most important to get things going." Adults weren't completely immune to QRIO's charms either, Movellan said. Even though the researchers said it was OK, teachers supervising the children would try to stop them when they poked QRIO in the eye. However, the teachers did not try to stop the children when they poked the eyes of an inanimate toy robot, named "Robby," that looked like QRIO.
