Washington – George the robot is playing hide-and-seek with scientist Alan Schultz. George whirs and hides behind a post until he’s found.
Then a bit later, he hunts for and finds Schultz hiding.
If that sounds childish, consider that Schultz is working his way up to teaching the robot to play Capture the Flag.
What’s so impressive about robots playing children’s games? For a robot to find a place to hide and then hunt for its human playmate is a new level of human interaction. The machine must take cues from people and behave accordingly.
This is the beginning of a real robot revolution: giving robots some humanity.
“Robots in the human environment – to me, that’s the final frontier,” said Cynthia Breazeal, robotic-life group director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Robotics is moving from software and gears operating remotely – on Mars, at the bottom of the ocean or on assembly lines – to finally working with, beside and even on people.
“Robots have to understand people as people,” Breazeal said. “Right now, the average robot understands people like a chair: It’s something to go around.”
The researchers who are injecting humanity into robotics are creating robots that can connect with humans in a more “thoughtful” way. They are building robot receptionists and robot physical therapists. They are finishing work on Huggable, a teddy-bear robot line that will help monitor the mental and physical health of sick children.
Robots are coaxing autistic kids out of their shells. And there’s a cute penguin robot, Mel, that makes eye contact with people and nods when they talk.
The places we will first see these robots are in the most human-oriented fields – those that require special care in dealing with the elderly, young and disabled.
Sebastian Thrun, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director, predicted that 10 years from now, robots will roam the health-care system and that in our homes, multi-armed robots will do the cleaning.
That’s a big switch. The latest commercial home robots – the vacuuming iRobot Roomba, and its floor-cleaning cousins – are designed to work best when people leave the room.
On the other end of the spectrum are David Hanson of Dallas and Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, whose robots look creepily human. Ishiguro’s robot Geminoid looks just like Ishiguro.
Such uncanny resemblances have led roboticists to coin the term “uncanny valley” syndrome. It suggests that people respond better to robots the closer they resemble humans – up to a point. If the resemblance is too good, human acceptance plummets.
