Play has been a big piece of technology ever since the first video games, but robots haven’t been in on the fun. Most robots are built for industrial.
At the SIGGRAPH conference in Hong Kong, one of the groups presenting there from the London College of Communication, set up an exhibit called Influencia, where little robots run around and interact with people. The point, according to the team’s statement, is to get people to engage with the machines, and think about the social implications.
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David McLellan, who led the team, told Discovery News that the programming is based on a simple set of rules. Robots will follow people until they are "distracted" by something else. If a person moves toward the robot, it moves away, as though it were being cautious. "People must learn how to engage with the robots and discover how to maintain the robots attention," he wrote in an email.
An interesting side effect is that some people, he added, unconsciously try to keep the robot's attention, just as they do with live human beings. But the kinds of things they do -- stamping feet, for instance -- would disturb or scare an animal and probably irritate a human. "Maybe it is humans that are not always as intelligent as we would like to believe we are," he said.
For decades roboticists have trying to make robots more like humans, giving them everything from facial expressions to the ability to walk. Some are even teaching language and parenting skills. So this kind of interaction will become more important as time goes on.
Image: SIGGRAPH
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