Journalist robot: robot system making news articles from real world

Abstract

We describe the development of a journalist robot system, which generates articles by searching for news in the real world. Our system repeats the steps: (1) autonomous exploration (2) recording of news, and (3) generation of articles. We characterize events with two values: "anomaly" and "relevance" to the user. During the exploration step, images are evaluated using these values. If an interesting event is detected, the robot approaches it to collect additional information. The system then labels the images, and generates a description from the labels. Experiments show the ability of our system to find news-like phenomena and describe images with words.