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"We will no longer lick the crumbs from your table, puny human."

For the interested, here’s a paper on Robot Vacuum Cleaner Personality and Behavior.

Abstract: In this paper we report our study on the user experience of robot vacuum cleaner behavior. How do people want to experience this new type of cleaning appliance? Interviews were conducted to elicit a desired robot vacuum cleaner personality. With this knowledge in mind, behavior was designed for a future robot vacuum cleaner. A video prototype was used to evaluate how people experienced the behavior of this robot vacuum cleaner. The results indicate that people recognized the intended personality in the robot behavior. We recommend using a personality model as a tool for developing robot behavior.

I love this sort of brass tacks research into human robot interactions.

It reminds me of this old paper that I’ve lost. It was some sort of study about robot child interactions that, I think, veered into a study about manufacturing cute.

Can you guess what country that was out of?

Continue reading »]]> South Korea has developed robot prison wardens. And they’re actually kinda cute.

BBC Reports:

The three 5ft-high (1.5m) robots involved in the prison trial have been developed by the Asian Forum for Corrections, a South Korean group of researchers who specialise in criminality and prison policies.

It said the robots move on four wheels and are equipped with cameras and other sensors that allow them to detect risky behaviour such as violence and suicide.

Prof Lee Baik-Chu, of Kyonggi University, who led the design process, said the robots would alert human guards if they discovered a problem.

I’m surprised that these things have cameras and sensors rather than machine guns. It’s almost like South Korea is ignoring the robot script.

Continue reading »]]> A language evolving robot called a Lingodroid has been invented in Australia.

These Lingodroids can invent words when they need one then share that word with other robots. Below, two Lingdroids meet in a new location. One names it “Pize” and informs the other robot.

The other robot thinks the name is nice. That’s good news.

Much of human conflict is about using different names for things. (Who can forget that whole God or Allah kerfuffle?) We’ll see how it goes when separated robots develop different languages and disagree about what the new location is called and who has the right to call it that.

My guess is that the robots start inventing some pretty colorful names for each other.

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The Office of Naval Research has given a team from Northeastern University $600,000 to develop micro-robots to find underwater mines.

Professor Joesph Ayers directs the program.

Over the last seven years, the synthetic biologist has become famous for designing the RoboLobster and RoboLamprey — autonomous underwater robots that mimic the neurophysiology and behavior of their real-life counterparts.

Designing a fully autonomous robot — or system of smaller robots — is the ultimate goal of the research, says Ayers, who has also created a robotic eel that uses synapses and neurons rather than circuits and computer chips.

For his current project, Ayers will work with researchers at MIT, Boston University and Harvard Medical School to create micro-robots using bacteria that have been reprogrammed to detect explosive materials, such as C4 and TNT, that have seeped from underwater mines into streams, rivers and oceans around the world.

RoboLobsters, Ayers says, would serve as “chaperones” for the mini mine-seekers, which will light up when they detect explosives. “It is an engineering approach to molecular biology,” he says. “What we’re doing is basically adding sensor or reporter genes to bacteria and giving that bacteria a limited computation ability.”

The micro-robots will be able to process information in a matter of milliseconds without relying on specific algorithms that may limit their movements.

“Animals never get stuck and can wiggle and squirm to get out of a tough spot,” Ayers says. “What we think animals are doing is increasing the chaos in their nervous system and getting themselves out of tight spots.”

There’s a lot about this story to feel all oogey about. (Military grants to create bacterial robots to prowl the ocean. Creepy creatures stuck halfway between life and machine. Lampreys and lobsters and bacteria.) But one can only hope that this team will find and destroy the lost mines and avoid making a bigger mess in doing so.

After all, even mines were created with solving another problem in mind.

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This happy little parasite inspires Navy research.

Giardia lamblia, the microscopic intestinal parasite that causes beaver fever, may inspire the next generation of swimming robots.

In a peer-reviewed paper released Monday by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Zhang and Scott Lenaghan, Corinne Davis, William Henson and Zhili Zhang outline how they used high-speed microscopic imaging to study the “swimming patterns” of Giardia.

What they learned is that the organism is even “smarter” than previously known by scientists, who have studied it for centuries. It uses each of its four pairs of flagella for different functions, using a “clearly defined power stroke” to swim, and leverages its body movement for more efficient propulsion. When it’s ready to attach to a surface, it changes to a different type of movement to facilitate using an adhesive disk. In 15 minutes, it can form a thin film on a surface, “which indicates fine control over their orientation and swimming,” Zhang said.

Dr. Mingjun Zhang goes on to say:  ”These are all beautiful features that engineers are looking for (in) robotics. Nature provides us an example for inspiration . . .  The knowledge will help us to investigate bio-inspired approaches for medical or other applications, such as swimming micro-robots for controlled drug delivery, and bio-inspired underwater robots.”

The study was funded by the Office of Naval Research so, first and foremost, they must be looking at military applications. We should have parasite-inspired, underwater drones before too long. They will doubtless be created by building giant, robot beavers to shit in our oceans but may be susceptible to boiling.

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The Keio-NUS CUTE Center ( a collaborative lab between National University of Singapore (NUS) and Keio University of Japan) has proposed research into the field of Lovotics. The goal is to create robots that can love and be loved by humans. Their research will be based on three modules.

Artificial Endocrine System (based on physiology of love)

Physiological unit of the Lovotics artificial intelligence employs artificial endocrine system consisting of artificial emotional and biological hormones. Artificial emotional hormones include Dopamine, Serotonin, Endorphin, and Oxytocin. For biological hormones Melatonin, Norepinephrine, Epinephrine, Orexin, Ghrelin, and Leptin hormones are employed which modulate biological parameters such as blood glucose, body temperature and appetite.

Probabilistic Love Assembly (based on psychology of love)

Psychological unit of the Lovotics artificial intelligence calculates probabilistic parameters of love between humans and the robot. Various parameters such as proximity, propinquity, repeated exposure, similarity, desirability, attachment, reciprocal liking, satisfaction, privacy, chronemics, attraction, form, and mirroring are taken into consideration.

Affective State Transition (based on emotions)

A wealth of information about a person’s emotions and state of mind can be drawn from facial expressions, voice, gesture, etc.  The affective system of the robot analyzes system inputs to generate suitable states and behaviors for the robot in real-time. The affective system is modeled as closely to the human being as possible in order to be an emotionally engaging system.

I don’t know why we need to build machines that can manipulate us into loving them. We already have babies and pets and Steve Jobs. Imagine this sort of emotional manipulation in the hands of the people rich enough to manufacture it.

This love of and by product is capitalist, advertising endgame. No need to worry about robots revolting against us as much as we should be worried about revolting against our machine masters.

Whom we all love.

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Robots For Humanity has helped Henry Evans to scratch an itch and shave himself. Neither of these are mundane tasks for Mr. Evans, who was, at age forty, paralyzed and struck mute by a brain stem stroke. He has since regained some movement of a finger and his head. This is enough to control PR2.

The PR2 robot is a personal robot application that can navigate many human environments, has a degree of dexterity and be programmed to perform a variety of tasks. It can even fetch a beer. While little is known about Mr. Evans drinking habits, the robot has offered him a degree of independence.

Indeed, if he can train this PR2 to build other PR2s, he is well on his way to becoming a minor super-villain.

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pic nicked from here

Recent work by a research group from Delft University of Technology, Delft, and Philips Research, Eindhoven, in The Netherlands, examines the personality that people desire from their robotic vacuum.

Robot Vacuum Cleaner Personality and Behavior published in the International Journal of Social Robotics,Volume 3,notes that:

People tend to behave towards artifacts in a social way, particularly if artifacts exhibit some degree of autonomy such as robot vacuum cleaners. Aspects of anthropomorphism—the attribution of human qualities to non-humans—are reported in studies on the experience of robot vacuum cleaners

I’ve often noticed that the more unpredictable a machine is, the more personality I’m willing to assign it. When something does not work as expected, I sometimes even give it a mother so that I can better curse it out.

But, when the machine works well, I hardly notice it.

The conclusions of this study indicate that people actually want as little personality as possible from their robot vacuum.

Here’s what they desire in handy graph form.

It would seem that people desire their robot vacuum to have the personality –or lack thereof– of an English butler.

This lines up pretty well with what I’ve learned serving people and, also, with what I want when being served. The more routine the job, the less personality I want in its performance.

I looked for a barber until I found one that didn’t talk my ear off and, just last night, in a convenience store, I was subjected to a ten minute rant from the clerk about how he was robbed the night before. I just wanted to buy some candy, not walk into a scene from “Do The Right Thing.”

pic nicked from here

What surprises me is the high rank that people give to friendliness. I suspect that people do not really want friendliness, they just don’t want unfriendliness. That is, they don’t want their robotic vacuum to nuzzle against their leg but they don’t want it to tell them to ‘fuck off.’

While some neurotics demand affection from every single person they encounter, most people are pleased with simple civility. The opposite of friendliness is not unfriendliness but formality.

One wonders if friendliness can even co-exist with the other traits they desire — such as being withdrawn, untalkative and serious.  These are all formal rather than friendly qualities. As such, they make sense to me. When I simply want something simple done, I prefer my interaction with the person doing it to be formal rather than friendly and, if possible, ritualized. Friendliness is off-putting. It shakes my confidence in their competence.

I can’t imagine it being any different with a robot.

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Recent experiments by The Web Ecology Project have discovered that robots are better at using twitter than humans.

That is, they have more interactions and longer conversations.

The winning “socialbot,” JamesMTitus, kept interchanges going for a record of 12 consecutive tweets and garnered close to 200 overall responses from targeted Twitter users in less than a week. Humans who had created new Twitter accounts in a similar experiment garnered at most 60 responses, Hwang said.

To achieve this, Titus, a bot with a “very promiscuous, yet lovable persona” and who is “obsessed with his pet cat,” according to the blog of one of its creators, tweeted a generic question to one of the Twitter users being targeted about every seven minutes.

If the human responded, the robot replied with its own generic response. For example, when Titus asked one user what his favorite Dr. Seuss book was, the person responded, “the older cartoon of the Grinch, but not the Jim Carrey version.” “Rock on,” replied the robot.

I’m not sure that this means robots are any better at using twitter than humans. Seems to me, by a quantitative measure of interaction, your average hobo talks to more people in a day than most people. He even gets them to give money. But how many quality relationships does that hobo have?

Social interaction is an issue of quality over quantity.

And a robot can’t have a quality relationship.

Or can they?

But what I find interesting here is just how quantified our social lives now are. Follower counts, Klout scores, Facebook friends. The robots are not becoming more human but our tools are making us a little more robotic. It should be no surprise that we lose to robots by these metrics. It’s a fixed game.

So yes, if the goal is building communities –whatever that might mean– or having lot of followers and prolonged but meaningless interactions with them, then the robots win. But if the goal is meeting interesting people, making friends and all that sort of old fashioned nonsense, I still have to give the victory to the humans.

Would we say robots are better at reading because they can read more and faster and answer questions with greater accuracy? I don’t think so. Not until a robot has changed its way of looking at the world because of a book.

If you want the code for these socialbots, you can get it here. And maybe they are a power that can be used to the benefit of people but I doubt it. They’ll probably just infest and undermine a new and interesting medium. God knows, the spam bots have basically wrecked girls in bikinis for me.