Smithsonian published a fascinating article about “robot babies,” examining several research efforts to build machines that have good social skills. Seen above is RUBI the robot with UC San Diego professor Javier Movellan, director of a research group that purchased a robotic Einstein head from Hanson Robotics, makers of the Philip K. Dick head. (The Smithsonian article features a great slideshow of robot photos by Timothy Archibald, familiar to BB readers as the photographer/author of Sex Machines.) From Smithsonian:
A turning point (for Movellan) came in 2002, when he was living with his family in Kyoto, Japan, and working in a government robotics lab to program a long-armed social robot named Robovie. He hadn’t yet had much exposure to the latest social robots and initially found them somewhat annoying. “They would say things like, ‘I’m lonely, please hug me,'” Movellan recalls. But the Japanese scientists warned him that Robovie was special. “They would say, ‘you’ll feel something.’ Well, I dismissed it–until I felt something. The robot kept talking to me. The robot looked up at me and, for a moment, I swear this robot was alive.”
Then Robovie enfolded him in a hug and suddenly–”magic,” says Movellan. “This is something I was unprepared for from a scientific point of view. This intense feeling caught me off guard. I thought, Why is my brain put together so that this machine got me? Magic is when the robot is looking at things and you reflexively want to look in the same direction as the robot. When the robot is looking at you instead of through you. It’s a feeling that comes and goes. We don’t know how to make it happen. But we have all the ingredients to make it happen.”
Eager to understand this curious reaction, Movellan introduced Robovie to his 2-year-old son’s preschool class. But there the robot cast a different spell. “It was a big disaster,” Movellan remembers, shaking his head. “It was horrible. It was one of the worst days of my life.” The toddlers were terrified of Robovie, who was about the size of a 12-year-old. They ran away from it screaming.
That night, his son had a nightmare. Movellan heard him muttering Japanese in his sleep: “Kowai, kowai.” Scary, scary.
Back in California, Movellan assembled, in consultation with his son, a kid-friendly robot named RUBI that was more appropriate for visits to toddler classrooms.