Say hello once, then purr
- Log
- 11 of 26
- Date
- Reading
- 2 min read
Skills in this log
A robot that greets you seven times in ten minutes is not polite, it is a doorbell. On 23 and 24 October I taught it to say hello once.
The greeting, by the gaze
The rule fits in one sentence: when I look at it for a second, it greets me, at most once every 20 minutes, and once per look.
Inside the machine, “looking at it” needed a definition. It counts only if the robot has recognised me, on three images where my face is turned towards it, and a gap in detection shorter than half a second does not break the look. A fresh reviewer found three important holes in the first version: the look counted even when I was not recognised, or while the robot was busy with something else. Fixed before going on the robot.
The greeting itself: my name and a delighted face on the slate, a little wave of the antennas, and a sound from the maker’s library, a soft rolling “vrrr”.
What I did not like
I tried it on the robot on 24 October: a greeting 30 seconds after the program started, then a greeting by the gaze 99 seconds later, with the 20-minute delay shortened for the test. The mechanism worked. Two things did not. The antennas opened too wide. And the recorded movement that goes with the “vrrr” turned the head away from me while it purred at me. Rude.
The purr
So the purr became its own gesture. The sound plays alone, the head stays on me, and the antennas beat during the sound around a pose tilted 15 degrees from vertical. I watched three or four variants on the robot and chose the smallest:
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Amplitude asked | ±4° |
| Amplitude measured | ±5.4° |
| One back-and-forth | 0.15 s |
Small, quick, close to a shiver of pleasure. The robot overshoots the ±4° I ask for, most likely because the motors carry a little momentum at that speed.
The verdict, one day later
In the night of 24 to 25 October my verdict was short: the purr towards me is great, the antenna wiggle lasts too long. The greeting went from 8 seconds to 3. The purr stays.
Next
That same night, something less charming: the robot bumped its own shell, and stopped answering.
