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Language: en
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you're watching a Nova science Now video
podcast can a robot be your friend
engineer Cynthia Brazil certainly thinks
so she's the director of the robotic
life group at MIT and has designed some
of the world's most emotionally engaging
machines here's her take on friendly
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robots there's something special I think
about robots they kind of cross that
boundary from the device to the animate
world I think more than any other
technology we've really been exposed to
yet how do you build a machine to be
socially and emotionally intelligent in
the way that people or at least animals
are the question for the robot is not
are robots going to have human emotions
or dog emotions because they're never
going to be humans or dogs but what is a
robot emotion and that we would find it
to be genuine and authentic to same way
that we ascribe genuine emotions to dogs
and other animals that's the deeper
question if you look at movies in
science fiction of course people are
very readily willing to ascribe
authentic emotional states to the sort
of robots you see on the screen like
R2-D2 or C3PO they wouldn't be
compelling characters if you
didn't nice robot you're such a cute
little robot you why do we try to
pattern their robots on
infants well there's a number of reasons
why we do that one is simply from
appreciating that when adults interact
with infants and very young children we
adapt our Behavior to that of the level
of sophistication of the child in a way
that helps the child understand us and
interact with us we make bigger gestures
we make bigger facial expressions we
become almost cartoon-like in the way we
interact with young children makes it
easier it turns out for babies and very
young children to
extract what we're trying to communicate
to them so we leverage that in building
these robots that are also very youthful
in their nature because it helps
simplify the perceptual problem for the
robots and part of it is also just
managing expectations so having an adult
interact with a robot that's not at your
level they kind of get the feeling of oh
well this is just like a very very young
child for something like the hugable
which is being designed to be this
interactive teddy bear the goal is to
make it a sort of invisible robot in
that when you interact with this teddy
bear you shouldn't think of it as a
robot at all there shouldn't be anything
distracting about it in a technological
sense that you often see in these
robotic toys today so there's so much
that just
screams I'm a machine I'm a machine we
put a soft silicone skin underneath the
fur so when you touch the fur you feel
something that's much more sort of
fleshy almost we've put a lot of thought
into the design of the mechanics of the
actuators so you don't hear the gears
nashing you don't feel the grittiness of
the gears it feels much more like
muscles with my own children I
appreciate very much how much of when I
play with them and interact with them
it's a very physical tactile process I
sit them on my lap I'm stroking their
hair you know it's not just verbal or or
visual it's extremely tactile so how do
you design a robot that can understand
that emotional communicative intent
behind the way you touch it so this
physical visceral full body um
interaction is really what that project
is about what we really want are these
sort of robotic companions that really
nurture the child's curiosity and
exploration and have it be a very
sharing oriented interaction where
you're really encouraging the child to
use their imagination there's so much we
still have yet to learn about how people
are going to interact with these robots
over really long term nobody's really
done that
yet learn more about Cynthia Brazil and
her friendly robots in the November 21st
episode of Nova science now you can see
more of this slideshow on our website at
pbs.org
slova science now