After the successes a few years ago of our robot band at the various Maker Faire in Rome, ITST Marconi of Campobasso will be present at the similar event in Orlando, U.S., scheduled for Nov. 5 and 6, with its brand-new robot, named Dantroid.
The Dantroid project was born from the idea of celebrating the 700th anniversary of the great poet’s death in a modern way, combining skills from different disciplinary areas in a cross-cutting way. In fact, due to its peculiarities, the project stands out in the fields of linguistics-literature, electronics and computer science.
It is a robot with the appearance of the supreme poet who has human movements, introduces himself, recites selected tercets from the Divine Comedy and explains some of the vocabulary words used by Dante, contextualizing their meaning.
The study of Dante’s words was carried out by Marconi students in collaboration with the Accademia della Crusca of Florence, a partner in the project, which attended the final event at the end of last school year expressing great satisfaction with the work.
The android, which can open, close, and move its eyes, move its mouth when “talking,” nod and express disagreement with head movements, and wave its hand, is guided through a specially designed app.
In addition, the possibility of guiding Dantroid through artificial intelligence is also under development. In particular, a learning model capable of making the robot speak in the style of Dante Alighieri is being studied. The technique used is Machine Learning, which allows a machine to learn through examples. The text used is the Divine Comedy: the artificial neural network recognizes the statistical correlation that exists between the words in the Comedy, thus learning the artist’s style and simulating the creative behavior of a human being.
source: cblive.it
