Ishiguro says that one day people could communicate remotely using their robot doubles, using them like sophisticated cell phones. Scientists at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology recently unveiled a singing robotic head that can read music and react to facial expressions. “Robots with various human-like facial expressions and conversation capabilities are useful for attracting attention from human beings and, therefore, are especially suitable for applications involving robot and human interaction,” Chyi-Yeu Lin and his researchers wrote in a paper. Although he wrote later in the paper that “people love robots and they like to watch performances of these robots,” many Internet reactions were less kind. One website described the singing, rubbery head as “creepy” and another described it as “a melodious abomination.” Austrian researchers at the University of Salzburg recently undertook an investigation of what people would like to see in a service robot, particularly one designed to operate in a public space. They had assumed that respondents would prefer an anthropomorphic robot design, but that was not the case. “In contrast to our assumptions, the results
The National Taiwan University of Science and Technology’s musical robot head, which can learn a piece of music by sight in a matter of seconds. Photo courtesy the NTUST.
showed that the participants did not prefer a merely anthropomorphic design for an interactive urban robot, but a combination of anthropomorphic and functional elements,” they wrote in a paper. “Human cues like eyes and a mouth turned out to be essential in the imagination of these potential users in order to know how to interact with a robot.” The end result — which the researchers said needs more fine tuning — turned out to be a one-armed cat-like robot riding on a wheel.
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Mission Critical
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Fall 2011
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