Kismet was the MIT robot developed by Cynthia Breazeal to study social interaction in the late 1990s. Its design focused on expressive communication with humans through facial features, head movement, gaze, and vocal-like sounds rather than industrial manipulation.
Kismet used cameras and microphones to perceive aspects of a person’s behavior and generated social responses based on drives such as attention and engagement. Its face used movable components around the eyes, ears, eyebrows, lips, and mouth to produce recognizable expressions.
Kismet is sometimes mistaken for a general-purpose humanoid robot. It was instead an experimental social robot, built to investigate how machines might participate in human-like interaction. The project influenced later research into affective computing, human-robot interaction, and robots that communicate through nonverbal cues as well as spoken language.