MiRo for Research and Development

MiRo is a different sort of robot based on a simple premise: animals are a lot smarter than today's robots in many respects. Not only that, they are robust, adaptable and good at communicating their ‘quasi-feelings’ – all features that we'd like to see in our robots. So, rather than working out how to develop smart robots from scratch, our approach is to build robots that think and operate much like mammalian animals; from their senses and decision-making processes, all the way through to their bodies and behaviours. MiRos’ are particularly suited to robot-human interaction as well as robot-to-robot interaction and swarming/herding.

Designed to have an emotionally engaging personality by a talented development team led by the award-winning designer Sebastian Conran, and experts in biomimetic and 'brain-based' robots, Professor Tony Prescott and Dr Ben Mitchinson from the University of She eld, MiRo aims to accelerate research on next generation animal-like robot companions.

MiRo is currently programmed to respond to aural, visual, and tactile stimuli, modulating its internal emotional state, and communicating expressively through movement, colour and sound. On-going research may add map-building & navigation, memory, learning from reward, speach, person perception and multi-modal social interaction capability.

MiRo is a development project that is just starting out. Researchers are invited to collaborate in creating the functionality of tomorrow's companion robots by programming MiRo’s software to interface with our unique brain-inspired robot controller; or build your own control system(on-or o -board) and show us how it should be done! Miro is available to purchase from http://consequentialrobotics.com