Researchers in Japan gave children the opportunity to spontaneously abuse robots, and studied what then happened. (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.) They produced this video and these studies about that: “Escaping from Children’s Abuse of Social Robots,” Drazen Brscić, Hiroyuki Kidokoro, Yoshitaka Suehiro, and Takayuki Kanda, In Proceedings of the Tenth […]
Tag: robots
Patients prefer robots (to tablets)
If you were obliged to receive healthcare instructions from a machine rather than a human, which would you prefer, a robot or a tablet? ‘People respond better to robots than computer tablets delivering healthcare instructions’ say a team from the Department of Psychological Medicine, and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, at The University […]
Robots Ring the Doorbell
“Generally speaking, modeling the developmental trajectory for almost any intelligent task that a 2-year-old child can perform on a robot is a potential research topic for us.” – explains the website of the Developmental Robotics Lab at Iowa State University, US. As an example to help clarify the (somewhat ambiguous) statement above, see the lab’s […]
Robot orchestra acquires clothingless humans
One of Belgium’s most renowned robot orchestras has acquired the use of several naked persons. The orchestra, sans naked persons, was written up a few years ago in a study: “The Man and Machine Robot Orchestra at Logos,” Laura Maes, Godfried-Willem Raes and Troy Rogers, Computer Music Journal, 35:4, pp. 28–48, Winter 2011. The authors, […]
Swarms of Riderless Unicycles: research roundup
If you thought that the words ‘Unicycle’ and ‘Swarm’ are rarely found in close proximity to each other, you would be mistaken. In fact, the last few years have seen a great deal of academic effort directed specifically at the possibilities offered by a ‘Swarms of Unicycles’. Here are some recent examples from the many […]
Robots speech – Japanese pneumatic style
There are now several well-established ways to create artificial voices – some take a purely electronic approach, while others, like Professor Hideyuki Sawada at Kagawa University, Japan, have explored electro-mechanical methods. The video above shows how pneumatically-driven artificial lips, tongues, voicebox and nasal resonating cavities might simulate speech. Unfortunately, the mpeg videos linked-to via the […]
Abusing robots – current positions [part 4 of 4]
Given that various groups of academic researchers (and others) are already investigating the torture of robots, and that these procedures raise ethical questions [See previous posts on this topic.] We now turn to the question of how robots might express the levels of ‘pain’ to which they are exposed. Clearly they must be able to […]
Abusing robots – current positions [part 3 of 4]
Continuing our observation of inquiries into the torture of robots, we now turn to the ethical questions raised (by some). Kate Darling – who presented the recent ‘Robotic Dinosaur Abuse Workshop’ in Geneva, examines such questions in a paper entitled – Extending Legal Rights to Social Robots – (presented at the We Robot Conference, University of […]
Robots and humans interact – part 3 of 3
Improbable’s final (previous here) look at the RO-MAN Workshop 2012. – the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, which was held September 9-13, Paris, France. Part 3 : Floating-in-the-air ‘bot ‘Humanoid’ robots go back a long way, and nowadays there are numerous flying robots in the skies, but there are very […]
Robots and humans interact – part 2 of 3
Improbable continues its look at the RO-MAN Workshop 2012. – the 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, which was held September 9-13, Paris, France. Part 2 : Change the music and dance There are robots which attempt to dance, there are robots which attempt to speak, and there are robots which […]