Robots with humanity

Research scientist Candy Sidner at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab in Cambridge, Mass., found that people respond better to more animated robots — those that nod, move and point. So she developed Mel, a pointing, nodding penguin robot. You nod at Mel, Mel nods back.

“It’s absolutely very compelling. People tell me, ’I like Mel because he’s really kind of cute,”’ Sidner said.

How should a robot look? There’s debate on that. On one extreme are the stroke-therapy robots of MIT scientists Neville Hogan and Hermano Igo Krebs. Those look like exercise machines with video game screens. They guide the arms and legs of paralyzed stroke patients through physical therapy, and the patients don’t even realize they are robots.

On the other end of the spectrum are David Hanson of Dallas and Osaka University’s 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, people “are weirded out,” Sidner said. At that point, acceptance plummets. That’s why Sidner prefers her penguin robot.

Sherry Turkle at MIT worries about robots that seem too human.

“We’re cheap dates,” she says. “If an entity makes eye contact with you, if an entity reaches toward you in friendship, we believe there is somebody there ... But that doesn’t mean that there is. That just means that our Darwinian buttons are being pushed.”

Turkle, who directs the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, fears people will be subconsciously tricked into giving robots more credit than they deserve. Her point is that when you are sick, hurt, or elderly, “you really do want a person,” not a robot.

Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of people working in nursing homes and caring for old people and the disabled, said Maja Mataric, director of the University of Southern California’s Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems. The average stroke victim gets 39 minutes of active exercise a day when six hours a day is needed, she said, so robots can free up the few nurses for more nurturing activities.

Mataric adjusts her robots’ personalities to fit the needs of stroke patients — nurturing buddy or goal-pushing coach.

And in the case of low-functioning autistic children, they actually seem to relate better to robots than humans, Mataric said. “You’ll see a child smile that has never smiled before. No one knows why it happens.”

The scientists trying to engineer robots to work with humans are learning more than they expected. They have a new appreciation for our own unique abilities.

Said Deb Roy, director of MIT’s Cognitive Machines Group: “It’s not until you try to build a machine that does the same task (that people do) ... that you realize how incredibly hard it is.”

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