Showing posts with label Social Robots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Social Robots. Show all posts

Caring Cyber Excitement


Work continues on the human/robot interface in many areas. The efforts are normally directed at human to robot communication to get one or the other to carry out a task, or for the robot to sense the presence of the human so that they can help without hurting the person, by pushing or gripping too firmly for example.

Robots are also available as pets, and these have to respond to touch and speech in an appropriate manner. The concept of robots as surrogates for pets seems an easy one to grasp, but a new surrogacy is finding it’s way into our world. The latest is a robot design to be an affection surrogate for your loved ones when you have to communicate with them at a distance.

This idea is being refined by Hooman Samani from the U Singapore and the Hooman/robot version of the human/robot interface is a responsive kissing machine (1). It consists of a set of lips on a plastic ball. There are sensors and activators connected to the lips via a microprocessor circuit which provides rapid feedback with a connection to your loved one’s robot wirelessly via the Internet.

So you make your voice or video call and greet your loved one by kissing your robot. Your loved one kisses their robot and you both feel the sensation in your lips. This is a family robot, so they behave very properly and don’t indulge in any wild flings, although you would get different responses from your child, your partner or your aunt.

I think that I would have to restrict my use to video calls only as with just a voice call, there is the possibility of getting a wrong number and giving a complete stranger of the wrong sex a long lingering kiss.

Hooman is taking his ideas further and is talking about a future when robots will be kissing humans, but not just to pass the kiss on and, I am still trying to digest this one, robots kissing robots. I can picture a robot delivering a “Kissogram” on Valentine’s Day to a young woman or man. But picture, if you will, a robot delivering a “Kissogram” to the domestic robot of the house. Of such things, movies could be made.

  1. http://robotics.nus.edu.sg/hooman/
  2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSckuNlzQdM&feature=player_embedded


Thanks to http://www.improbable.com/ for drawing this exciting work to our attention.

Website @ http://jimgoodwinbooks.com/

Some Trash Cans Can Be Sociable Too.


“Tidy your room, now!” is a command that many of us have heard more than once in our youth. We probably found much more pressing things to do. But when we get older and walk around in a public place, some of us drop litter and the rest of us gnash our teeth and complain. Of course, if litterbins are full and overflowing, our ire might be directed at the local municipal bureaucrats, but when they aren’t full up we rant about the nature of the general population.

There may be a solution on the horizon, (not for the bureaucrats but for the general population,) in the form of sociable trash boxes or STBs. Yamaji et al have designed and built such devices and tried them out with children who are used as an unspoilt (that is naïve) model for behavior (1).

Robotic trash boxes were built and had different colors to indicate their favorite trash. They could rock and roll about and could see trash as well as kids. They were keenly aware of their spatial relations from proximity sensors. This defined three spaces – the large distance or public space, a social space (close enough to be aware that they were interacting) and an intimate or personal space.

The robot has a sensor that tells it that there is a human around that it can importune them for food. The 5 – 6-year olds didn’t take much notice of the STBs waggling and begging to be fed at long distance. However, if they came closer to the child and the trash can jiggled about with excitement, they were rather more successful. The kids didn’t care if they were up close and personal or just sociably close, they responded the same way about 30% of the time and picked up the trash and put it in the box.

That might sound like a reasonable success rate, but wait, the rate went up to a whopping 70% when the boxes swarmed together and made their approached . Even better as the boxes were in different colors, the kids sorted the trash into the right type of box for paper, plastic etc.

I’m sure that we’d all feel pressured to pick up our trash, or other peoples, and put it in the correct box when being approached by a swarm of hungry boxes, jiggling up and down begging to be fed. How could we just walk on by and leave them jumping up and down by a discarded soda can when all we would have to do is pick it up and pop it in the blue box?

  1. Y. Yamaji, T. Miyake, Y. Yoshiike, P. R. S. DeSilva & M. Okada, Int. J. Soc. Robotics, doi 10.1007/s 12369-011-01114-y