Welcome to the Demonstrators area

From Prototypes to the Phase II Demonstrator

The Companions project approaches its mid point with its planned shift from Phase I prototypes and research to its Phase II demonstrator. The original motivating idea of the project was to build platforms rapidly with interesting Companion-like functionality, but not as final products but intermediate ones from which we could derive more data and on which we could build research experiments in planning, emotion and machine learning.

All this was to be combined during Phase II into a final demonstrator on the basis of the initial evaluations of Phase I prototype performance.

The Phase II demonstrator is now being planned on the basis of the two Phase prototypes, their evaluations, and the key unifying idea will be that the same Companion personality will appear in each Companion manifestation, no matter what its physical form: mobile phone, PC screen, or rabbit toy. The Companion's persistence of personality is shown by voice, attitude, its knowledge of its user's family, and its knowledge of the user's tastes and choices. As well as fusing the functionality and 'personality' we shall use the mid-term evaluations to select the best performing modules from the two prototypes for the Phase II demonstrator.

Planned Demonstrators

Companions Demonstrators will show off the capabilities of the technology, and a number of components or modules that future research and products can build on to create a variety of Companions.

Companions research will feed into a number of planned demonstrators, such as the Senior Companion, the Health and Fitness Companion, the Domotic (Household) Companion, and the Mobile Companion.