Increasingly human-like robots spark fascination and fear
Increasingly human-like robots spark fascination and fear
06 October 2018
MADRID (AFP) - Sporting a trendy brown bob, a humanoid
robot named Erica chats to a man in front of stunned audience members in
Madrid.
She and others like her are a prime focus of robotic
research, as their uncanny human form could be key to integrating such machines
into our lives, said researchers gathered this week at the annual International
Conference on Intelligent Robots.
"You mentioned project management. Can you please
tell me more?" Erica, who is playing the role of an employer, asks the
man.
She may not understand the conversation, but she's been
trained to detect key words and respond to them.
A source of controversy due in part to fears for human
employment, the presence of robots in our daily lives is nevertheless
inevitable, engineers at the conference said.
The trick to making them more palatable, they added, is
to make them look and act more human so that we accept them into our lives more
easily.
In ageing societies, "robots will coexist with
humans sooner or later", said Hiroko Kamide, a Japanese psychologist who
specialises in relations between humans and robots.
Welcoming robots into households or workplaces involves
developing "multipurpose machines that are capable of interacting"
with humans without being dangerous, said Philippe Soueres, head of the
robotics department at a laboratory belonging to France's CNRS scientific
institute.
- Human, but not too human -
As such, robots must move around "in a supple
way" despite their rigid mechanics and stop what they are doing in case of
any unforeseen event, he added.
That's why people are choosing "modular systems
shaped like human bodies" which are meant to easily fit into real-world
environments built for humans.
For instance Atlas, a humanoid robot made by Boston
Dynamics, can run on different types of surfaces.
In Madrid, Marc Raibert, founder of the US firm, played a
video showing Atlas doing a backflip.
In a sign of fears over the potential future uses for
these humanoids, Amnesty International has accused Atlas, financed by an agency
of the US Department of Defense, of being a "killer robot" made for
future warfare.
Another example of humanoids presented in Madrid is
Talos, a robot made by Spanish company Pal Robotics shown testing his stability
on a balance board.
While it may not be the only form used for those coming
into contact with humans, "it's easier for people to accept the robots
when they have human-like faces because people can expect how the robots will
move, will react," said Kamide.
That's comforting, but it also has its limits.
Japanese researcher Masahiro Mori's "uncanny
valley" theory, which he developed in the 1970s, states that we react
positively to robots if they have physical features familiar to us but they
disturb us if they start looking too much like us.
"You can't ever make a perfect human face" and
this imperfection provokes a feeling of "rejection" among humans,
said Miguel Salichs, a professor at the robotics lab of Madrid's Carlos III
University.
As such, he chose to fashion his robot Mini Maggie into a
small cartoon animal.
- 'Understand humans' -
In Japan, robots like Erica are already used as
receptionists.
But for one of their makers, Hiroshi Ishiguro, a
professor at Osaka University, humanoids are above all "a very important
tool to understand humans".
Researchers have to think hard about the human form and
how humans interact to develop robots that look like them.
"We understand the humans by using robots, the
importance for example of eye gazing," said Ishiguro, who has also made
robots that look like dead celebrities, or "moving statues".
He believes that humanoids are best to improve
interactions between robots and humans.
"The human brain that we have has many functions to
recognise humans. The natural interface for the humans is the humans,"
said Ishiguro.
For Jurgen Schmidhuber, president of artificial
intelligence start-up NNAISENSE, robots -- be they humanoid or not -- will be
part of our future.
They won't just imitate humans but will solve problems by
experimenting themselves thanks to artificial intelligence without "a
human teacher," he believes.
Sitting on her chair, Erica nods her head.
© 2018 AFP
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