Robots Take Part in the Human Experience

Movies like I, Robot and AI: Artificial Intelligence seemingly have inspired an era where people are striving to develop robots that help ease our daily lives. Recently, strides have been made in the area of robots for autistic children and patients requiring rehabilitation. These robots have helped people learn to interact with their peers and adults.

What was once a science fiction concept starts to become reality with The Kavli Foundation, an organization attempting to bring forth the collaboration between three of the greatest humanoid robot makers. They will get together to discuss the possibility of advancement in humanoid robot technology. The Kavli Foundation says that the biggest challenge lies in making robots interact with human minds in the way that humans would expect another human to interact. Professor Maja Mataric from University of Southern California said, "How we interact with embodied machines is different than how we interact with a computer, cell phone, or other intelligent devices. We need to understand those differences so we can leverage what is important."

One of USC's directors at the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, Mataric has already created robots that would work well for therapeutic purposes. He says that one of the biggest necessities for robot designers is the implementation of physiological and facial communication aside from verbal communication. This requirement comes from the fact that more than half of the communication done between humans comes from body language. He also mentions that robots must have a touch of their own personality: "We found that when we matched the personality of the robot to that of the user, people performed their rehab exercises longer and reported enjoying them more."

Perhaps the most interesting discovery about robotic-human interactions comes from Ayse Saygin, an assistant professor at University of California in San Diego. Saygin and some colleagues have come with a conclusion about an "action perception system," which exists in human psychology, telling humans what another is capable of. They found out that one must be careful about attempting to make robots human-like, as it can affect human response: "Making robots more human-like might seem intuitively like that's the way to go, but we find it doesn't work unless the human-like appearance is equally matched with human-like actions.”