Tech Students Develop Smartphone-controlled Robot to Read Bedtime Stories

A robot that will serve as a surrogate granny to read bedtime stories is being designed by tech students from a downtown Brooklyn college.

Grad student Jared Frank, 25, who's in the early stages of designing Caesar, told the New York Daily News that the robot can be a person's avatar and can read a bedtime story to kids in Brooklyn if you are a granny and live in Miami.

To make Caesar work, a real granny will use her phone to transmit her voice through the robot's mouth to do the reading, she then will be able to watch her grandkids' reactions through the robot's eyes, which are twin cameras.

The robot Caesar - whose name stands for "cellularly accessible expressive semi-autonomous robot" - can swivel its head and eyes to watch people walking around the lab.

Professor Vikram Kapila, who runs the NYU-Poly robotics lab where students are working on new high-tech projects to make machinery act like human beings, said that Caesar could also be turned into a robot receptionist who takes visitors' pictures and matches them with online photos so it can greet them by name.

Source: ANI