Comedy robot metal tested at the Barbican

Scientists from Queen Mary University of London have developed a robot to perform stand-up comedy to test what makes audiences laugh. On the eve of the Edinburgh fringe festival, the life-size robot called RoboThespian built by Engineered Arts performed two gigs alongside comedians Andrew O'Neill and Tiernan Douieb at the Barbican Centre last week. Researchers from Queen Mary's Cognitive Science Research Group analysed the robot against its human competition for the way it interacted with the audience and made them laugh. The performance was a live experiment to test how different gestures, timings and movement affect the responses to a joke. The researchers wanted to understand whether the robot can sense the audience's response and react appropriately or if it could 'work the audience' as well as a human comedian. Programmed by PhD student Kleomenis Katevas, the robot performed the same routine written by stand-up comic Tiernan Douieb with slight variations. Kleomenis says: "We used computer vision and audio processing software to detect the response of each audience member simultaneously- something a human comic cannot do.