Meet Boxie. He’s a robot videographer with levels of interaction we haven’t seen outside an episode of Dora the Explorer. The project was conceived by [Alex] as his MIT thesis project to see if robots can use humans to make themselves more useful. All we know is Boxie is freaking adorable, as evidenced by this video.
The idea behind Boxie was inspired by Afghan Explorer to capture video in an attempt to tell a story. In the videos (after the break), Boxie wanders around the halls of MIT searching for people to help him (“can you carry me up the stairs?”) and tell stories (“what do you do here?”). It’s an experiment in autonomous documentary directorial skill that was edited down into a video that made sense.
[Alex] designed Boxie to be the cutest thing we’ve ever seen so he could elicit a response from the subjects of the documentary. We’re going to say the voice helped, but [Alex] also found the cardboard robot factor also played into the success. Boxie was originally planned to have a plastic skin, but [Alex]‘s friends thought it looked really creepy. They suggested that [Alex] go back to the prototype cardboard body. All we know is there’s a robot cuter than a Keepon, finally.
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