NICO - The Self-Aware Robot Points At Mirror And Says, "Hey, It's Me!"

Self awareness is the ability of identifying oneself as an individual and is based on a mirror test.  To clear this test,  the object has to identify itself or a mark its body in the mirror. Apart from humans, only a few more animals are self aware and now a robot called NICO is added to the list. The concept is not restricted to mirrors, robots are not only incapable of identifying their mirror images but also fail to identify their body parts directly; for instance, a robot looking towards it's arms cannot identify them as it's own. To overcome the senselessness of robots, scientists from Yale university (Kevin Gold and Brian Scassellati) came up with the first self aware robot which they call NICO.

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NICO's motion sensors deliver information to its system software. The software then compares information received by the sensors and images captured by eye camera. If both the information sources turn out to be synchronous, then the robot identifies the mirror image as it's own, else it is identified as a foreign body. Scientists are now trying to teach the robot about it's body parts, their shape, size and texture which would help it reach a step further in recognizing itself.  Scientists believe that self awareness among robots is important to improve their interaction with humans. We are eager to know more.

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