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Cybert99 -> RE: My autonomous home robot... (1/13/2008 8:03:44 AM)
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Okay, a quick story that some of you may find entertaining...
When I wrote Cybert's speech routines I decided to give him "moods", as well. I won't go into the details but Cybert would start each day in a "normal" mood, then his sensor data would cause his mood to change. If he was in a dark room for too long, for example, he would start to get a little afraid. And he would get a little angry whenever he bumped into something. He had 9 different moods and every time I came up with something for him to say I'd write 9 different versions of it... one for each mood. I even changed his voice to match his mood. (If he was depressed his voice would get sort of low and monotone, for example.)
Several weeks after writing the mood stuff (and never really testing it), I decided to create his alarm clock behavior that you can see in the video. I did most of my work at night so I always had his voice turned off so as not to wake my wife or daughter. When I finally got the behavior working I set everything up and went to bed.
Cybert wasn't scheduled to wake us up until 7:30 or so, but I was awake at 6:45 because I was so excited. The clock on the bedside table hit 7:30 and less than a minute later I heard Cybert navigating down the hallway. He rolled into our bedroom and turned to face the bed. Then he told us to wake up, asked about the news and weather, asked about our stock portfolio (our stocks were up that morning, which was an added bonus!), and finally he asked about waking up our daughter. I said, "Yes" and off he went down the hallway again, stopping in front of Autumn's door. Everything was working perfectly! I was thrilled!
Cybert asked Autumn to get out of bed, then he "knocked" on her door 3 times and waited for the door to open. Our daughter HATED to get up in the morning so she didn't budge. Five minutes passed and since he didn't detect the door opening, my program looped back to try again. Only this time, Cybert's voice was deep and loud. And instead of his previous friendly prompting he said, "Okay! That's IT! GET OUT OF THAT BED RIGHT NOW!!!" He sounded pissed off!!!
At first I thought I had some kind of strange bug, but then I remembered his mood programming and I realized that "knocking" on the door had caused his mood to change from "normal" to "angry", which made my alternate dialogue kick in. Hmm... I guess that could help explain why Autumn never liked my robot. ;-) Anyway, it was sort of a cool "emergent behavior" and I chuckled about it for days.
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