Robots with humanity

Schultz finds George easily. George has a harder time spotting Schultz, but eventually succeeds.

For a child, this is nothing, but for a robot this should lead to a lot.

“We have only scratched the surface,” said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab director who won the Defense Department’s Grand Challenge for a self-driving robot car through the desert last year. He predicted that 10 years from now robots will roam the health care system and that in our homes, multi-armed robots will be doing the cleaning. “There will be a lot of personalized devices,” he says.

That’s a big switch. The latest commercial home robots — the $280 vacuuming iRobot Roomba, with more than 2 million of the disc-shaped devices sold, and its floor-cleaning cousins — are designed to work best when people leave the room. But the promise of robots for scientists is represented by Rosie, the vacuuming robot of “The Jetsons” cartoon series, who dutifully works as Jane blithely walks by.

“If Rosie is going to be around and in your face, it would be good if the interaction is natural and easy,” says Rod Brooks, director of MIT’s artificial intelligence lab.

So after spending decades tinkering with wiring, some roboticists — a usually male and techno-geek-heavy field — did the unthinkable. They put aside their hardware and software, and studied how humans think, work together and communicate so they could apply that to robots.

The new field of human-robot interaction was born. Unlike the rest of robotics, many of its leaders are women. It has social scientists, language specialists, medical doctors and even ethicists who wonder if putting robots into places like nursing homes is the right thing to do.

That’s a big change from 50 years ago, when the field of artificial intelligence was created at a forum at Dartmouth University. The experts focused on puzzles and chess and skipped over concepts such as perception, a sense of where you are, what’s around you and how to interact.

“They all thought perception was easy — a 2-year-old could do that — but smart people play chess,” said Brooks, co-founder of iRobot Corp. “They all missed it and Hollywood missed it. The stuff a 2-year-old could do, that’s the hard stuff.”

One preschooler-type skill, the ability to take someone else’s perspective, “turned out to be a very important capability that we needed on our robots so that they could really work comfortably with humans,” said Schultz.

Thus, Schultz hopes in the next year or so to have a robot that could, like an old-time movie detective working a case, tail a person walking through the naval research lab campus unseen.

Similarly, researchers are working on teaching language-reasoning — not just dumping a dictionary in the robot’s database — gestures and eye contact so robots can understand the many ways people communicate. At NASA, astronauts are working with Schultz and a spacewalking-prototype called Robonaut to make machines understand when an astronaut points to something and says “there.”

We as humans understand that, but getting robots to put those clues together is proving to be a big leap, he said. And then there are subtle clues that humans pick up without even knowing it, such as nods and eye contact.

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