GRACE Gives the Weather on "Good Morning America"

"Good Morning America" weather forecaster Tony Perkins got a helping hand from GRACE.

"Good Morning America" weather forecaster Tony Perkins has had many special guests who have helped him deliver his weather reports on the popular ABC-TV program, but he never had a robot until he met Carnegie Mellon's GRACE on the morning of Dec. 1.

Reporting live from Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center, GRACE, the socially adept robot created in part by researchers at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute, told Perkins that she always watches "Good Morning America" and that co-host Diane Sawyer was her idol. Looking at the national weather map, she told viewers what the current temperature was in Pittsburgh, Pa., and in Pittsburg, Kansas, Texas and New Hampshire.

Perkins interrupted GRACE midway through her report, saying he didn't want to lose his job to a robot.

Robotics Institute graduate students Rachel Gockley and Marek Michalowski programmed GRACE to interact with Perkins and operated her behind the scenes when she took center stage during the two-hour show.

Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon (led by Robotics Research Professor Reid Simmons), the Naval Research Laboratory, Metrica, Inc., Northwestern University and Swarthmore College, GRACE was created to compete in the American Association of Artificial Intelligence Annual Robot Challenge. She debuted at the 2002 conference in Edmonton, Alberta, where she autonomously registered for the conference, traveled to a meeting room and delivered a 15-20 minute presentation on her hardware and software.

GRACE has an expressive face on a panning platform as well as a large array of sensors, including a microphone, touch sensors, infrared sensors, sonar sensors, a scanning laser range finder, a stereo camera head on a pan-tilt unit, and a single color camera with pan-tilt-zoom capability. She can speak using a high-quality speech synthesizer, and understand responses using her microphone and speech recognition software.

For more on GRACE, which stands for Graduate Robot Attending a ConferencE, visit http://www.palantir.swarthmore.edu/GRACE/

GRACE and Tony Perkins pose with Robotics Institute graduate students Rachel Gockley and Marek Michalowski, and senior research technician Greg Armstrong.

Bruce Gerson