Armed with stereoscopic vision and some object and facial recognition programs, the Qbo robot can be seen learning to recognise itself in this short video.
Placed in front of a mirror, the open source Qbo robot was asked to identify the reflection and soon realised it was, in fact, himself.
Although the technology isn’t quite there yet, this promising start puts the robot in line to join a rather select band of creatures that have the ability to recognise their own reflections.
Apart from us clever humans, tests have found that three kinds of Gibbons, Bonobos, Chimpanzees, Orangutans, Gorillas, Bottlenose dolphins, Orcas, Elephants and European Magpies have all managed to past the ‘Mirror test.’
Here you can see the Qbo robot in action, and scroll down for the technical stuff::
This video corresponds to a small experiment in which we put Qbo in front of the mirror to see if he can learn to recognize himself. For that, we used the “Object Recognition” mode and the “Face Recognition” mode. Qbo, using its stereoscopic vision, selects his image in the mirror and, with the help of one of the engineers, learns how to recognize himself.
This quite simple experiment touches interesting psychological aspects of self-consciousness, whose complexity can be proved by the fact I already mentioned of the few species that can recognize themselves in front of the mirror. In this first version, a human guide presents Qbo to himself, but we are working so as the robot could present and self-recognize himself autonomously when found in front of the mirror.
