The Human Robot Interaction
is a major challenge, but an important one, as we get more robots interacting
with us in our homes and they are built with humanoid features. You see, we prefer to
share our homes with things that we perceive as biological rather than
unfeeling machines if we are going to have more complex helpful relationships
than we do with our toaster.
We do have to be careful
that we don’t make them too human-like, but don’t quite make it. Then we could
end up with a creepy, zombie-like butler that would fit right in the dip in the
Uncanny Valley Theory (1). Cuteness has its merits.
When we interact with
another person, we anticipate and tend to copy their action as our mirror neurons
fire away. That yawning spread like wildfire in that boring class we have all
sat through, didn’t it? This interaction is also known as motor resonance (2). We have two things going on. We have a
proactive gaze and then automatic imitation. Thus we anticipate and accommodate
the motion. The result is that we feel comfortable as long as the action isn’t
threatening.
Our robot butler/caregiver
shouldn’t be threatening, so we have to avoid the uncanny valley with no
zombies making unexpected moves. The key is to get that motor resonance
functioning well when we design our humanoid helpers, but the challenge is then
to find experimentally what works best with us humans in an everyday
environment.
A review of methods for
measuring motor resonance with the human robot interaction has been published by Scuitti et al and they show
that the behavioral methodologies such as studying predictive gaze and automatic
imitation measurements fit the bill much better than PET, fMRI or EEG scans.
If we can get the right
human robot interaction, the advent of rent-a-robot stores may not be far away.
It could work out better and more economical than have to pay for a place in a
care home.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
- A.Sciutti, A.Bisio, F.Nori, G.Metta,L.Fadiga, T.Pozzo and G.Sandini, Int. J. Soc. Robot., 223, 4, (2012)., http://www.springerlink.com/content/g82v75n437259607/fulltext.pdf
