Australian researchers are teaching a pair of robots to communicate linguistically like humans by inventing new spoken words, a lexicon that the roboticists can teach to other robots to generate an entirely new language.
Send a friend request to your computer, introduce it to friendship.
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
We posted about Simon, the attention-seeking robot, the other day. Here’s a video of Simon (who is both bigger and unnecessarily cuter than you might expect) waving meekly at a researcher busy playing with blocks.
”Simon” is a robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology that’s involved in a series of projects designed to look at the interaction between robots and humans. Recently, researchers have found that they can program Simon to understand when it has a human’s attention, and when it doesn’t, with nearly 80 percent accuracy.
Basically, Simon can tell if a person is ignoring him (no indication, incidentally, of whether or not this bothers him). This form of social intelligence will be crucial as we continue on our path to robot-human cohabitation. Imagine a world full of oblivious robots, performing duties that humans don’t notice! It’s both sad and terrifying.
Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech: “Other human beings understand turn-taking. They understand that if I make some indication, they’ll turn and face someone when they want to engage with them and they won’t when they don’t want to engage with them. In order for these robots to work with us effectively, they have to obey these same kinds of social conventions, which means they have to perceive the same thing humans perceive in determining how to abide by those conventions.”
(via caseypugh)
This video is absurdly heartwarming. To demonstrate the versatility robotic hand, a soft tug of a human scarf, a gentle grip of a human hand…a little head tilting up, “hello.”
I’m really floored by what Meka Robotics are doing with what they call “human-soft, human-scale” robot technologies. The pragmatic difficulty of building robots is so intense that it would be understandable if the robots being made in 2011 were just masses of cables and metal with a pair of googly eyes stuck on — or, worse, just horrifying, sophisticated Furbies. Meka makes robots that are not only not alienating, but immediately approachable and couched in a really considered design aesthetic. Are they the Apple computer of robotics?
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