Monkey Business is a system that attempts to keep distributed group members more connected and aware of each other's activities; the system aims to facilitate informal and spontaneous communication, while minimizing interruption at inopportune times. The system consists of a network of animatronic agents, one of which will reside in the office of each member of a distributed group. We have chosen the embodiment of a monkey for the form of these agents; hence Monkey Business as the title of this project.     The agent uses a combination of microphones and sensors to recognize the activity in the office that it occupies. If there is a change in the state of the office activity, the agent broadcasts the information out to the network of other agents. The other agents, through subtle gestures, movements, and sounds, indicate the changes of state of the broadcasting office. Thus all members of the group, through their respective agents, are made aware of each other's activities in an ambient manner.     If the agent in one office makes its owner aware of a particularly interesting event or conversation in another office, the owner may wish to learn more about the activity in the other office. He may indicate his interest by interacting with the agent, perhaps by leaning closer to it, a movement which the agent would sense with a proximity sensor. The agent can respond by widening the communication channels between the two offices, and even allowing the worker to listen in on the activity in the other office, through direct audio feed. The owner can then decide if he wants to participate somehow, either by using the intercom capabilities of the agent to communicate through it, by calling the other office, or by dropping in. He can be reasonably confident that he will be contributing to, rather than interrupting, any important work in the other office, since he is already aware of the relatively interruptible state of that office.     The animatronic monkeys are constructed out of monkey puppets. They each contain five servo motors: one for the head, one for each of the arms, one to make the monkey turn from left to right, and one to enable him to swing from his tail, giving the monkey a total of five degrees of freedom. The monkey hangs upside down from his tail on a rod, as shown to the right.     The monkey has an internal speaker and microphone, so that he can both listen to office noise, and broadcast sounds. He is not wireless, but rather is connected to a computer via a serial port; this configuration was chosen in part as a cost-saving measure, and in part to avoid having to continually recharge batteries. An animatronics server software application (seen below) on the computer sends out signals over the serial port to a microcontroller board, also located in the monkey, which then controls the servos and makes the monkey move. The monkey's microphone is used to gather audio data from its surroundings. The monkey is also equipped with motion and proximity sensors. It uses this combination of audio and sensor data to recognize what is going on in the office it inhabits.         The major challenge of this project is to determine the right combination of motion, gesture and sound snippets for the monkeys to communicate information effectively and not disruptively, in order to encourage greater informal interaction between distributed group members. We must determine how to represent different states with animatronic monkeys, as well as which states are the most important to represent. The monkey's actions should be as intuitive for humans to understand as possible.