[tt] New Scientist: Robot Articles (various)

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New Scientist: Robot Articles (various)

Interview: And they call it robot love
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925341.600&print=true
* 14 January 2006
* Rachel Nowak

How do people react when brought face-to-face with intelligent
robots for the first time? It's a question that has fascinated Mari
Velonaki for nearly a decade. But she is no anthropologist. She's
not even a scientist in the conventional sense. Velonaki is an
artist with a PhD, and a passion for electronics. She is also
determined enough to have convinced the prestigious Australian
Centre for Field Robotics in Sydney to give her a desk, lab space
and expert assistance to help her understand what happens when
humans interact with mechanical beings.

Velonaki has collaborated with robotics scientists at the centre to
create Fish-Bird, a live exhibition comprising a pair of moody,
love-struck robots disguised as wheelchairs that can communicate
through movement and written text. The exhibit has delighted and
excited people all over the world. At the same time it has given
researchers valuable data on the relationship between bots and
people. One thing that surprised them was how long visitors spent
with the robots. Many spent 30 to 40 minutes per visit; one visitor
came back every day for a week. Men, women and children relate to
them in different ways. Everyone appears to project human qualities
onto them.

The experience, Velonaki told Rachel Nowak, has taught her many
things. One of the lessons is that artists like her who work with
technology may have more in common with scientists in terms of what
it takes to realise their ideas than they do with others from the
broader art world.

You've designed an exhibition starring two love-struck robots that
look like decrepit wheelchairs. What's it all about?

Fish-Bird is based on a fairy tale from Greece about a fish and a
bird that fall in love but cannot be together: one needs water to
breathe, and the other air. They learn how to negotiate, to accept
their differences and that they cannot be together all the time.
There is no happy ending in my story, so it is much more realistic
than the usual fairy tale. Because it is about physical limitations
and negotiation, I chose to build robots that looked like
wheelchairs. Fish is a blue wheelchair, Bird is a red one. It is an
idea that I had been trying to make happen for eight years.

But these are not traditional robots...

No, they are not cute or pet-like. The chairs are old-fashioned.
They have motors, processors and computers, all hidden within the
upholstery. Everything is wireless. They communicate with each
other and with other devices via Bluetooth radio links. The chairs
are equipped with infrared collision sensors, and there are cameras
and scanning laser measurement systems in the space where they are
exhibited so each chair is always aware of both its own position
and the position of its "companion". If there is a problem anywhere
and we're not there, we can communicate with the robots by email
from anywhere in the world.

Can you explain what a visitor sees when they visit Fish-Bird at a
gallery?

The robots are in a room. Two people are allowed in at a time. To
start with, Fish and Bird move differently according to their mood.
They have seven moods based on days of the week. If, for example,
someone visits them on Monday, they are a bit maudlin; Fish is a
bit shyer and tends to go into the corners. Other days they are
more social. They might approach you or run away, go backwards or
circle the room. In a good mood they might get close to each other.
It also depends on what happened the previous day or what happened
two hours before, because Fish and Bird have a memory of their
mutual relationship.

They also have three emotional states for how they feel about
themselves (not very happy, neutral and positive), and three states
for how they feel about each other, which will determine how
they'll react to their visitors. Fish and Bird's behaviour also
depends on how many people come in, how physically close they are
to them and how much time each person spends with them. Fish and
Bird also write love letters to each other and communicate with
spectators via printed messages.

How do they do that?

We use little thermal printers below the seats that drop messages
on the floor. The room fills with paper so it has an element of
performance. People love it. The content of a message depends on
how much time spectators spend with Fish and Bird and how they
move. If children chase the robots, a message might say: "Stop, my
wheel is falling off." If they are really, really frustrated, they
go in the corner and don't move.

How have people reacted to Fish-Bird?

It is bizarre. People will talk to them, pat them and ask them
questions. They will say things like: "Are you afraid of me?" or
"Come closer." They often think that the robot is capable of more
than it actually is.

Men, especially, will try to work out how they move, because the
motors are concealed. They look to see what makes them move. They
wonder if the robots are remote-controlled, or if they are being
watched.

Children, on the other hand, pat Fish and Bird, kiss them and
encourage them to print more messages. At one venue, the New South
Wales Parliament House, they crawled about on the floor to be on
the same level as the robots. This was incredible. In 10 years of
work I have never seen anything like this. It appears that people
project human attributes onto the robots and relate quite closely
to them even though they look like wheelchairs.

How did you convince scientists at the Australian Centre for Field
Robotics to work with you?

I knew that some really amazing things were happening at the
centre. So I called Hugh Durrant-Whyte, its research director, and
said: "I'm an artist, and I've got this proposal that I would like
you to consider." Hugh asked me in the following week. I showed him
my work, as well as the proposal for Fish-Bird. I also showed him
that we had a basic language in common - that I could design,
construct and assemble a circuit board. It wasn't as if I was a
painter who suddenly wanted to work with robotics. There was a very
honest exchange and he was really interested.

> From your experience, do artists, engineers and scientists have
much in common?

There is a lot in common. They are passionate and proud people who
create things that didn't previously exist. People who are
passionate understand other people's passions; that's why I'm
there. You go there on Saturday and people are working. You are
there at 10 o'clock at night and people are working. It's not
because they are scared about losing their jobs; they are working
because they are really proud of what they do. They are like
artists.

How do you think collaborating with engineers has changed you?

I'm less temperamental. I raise my voice less than I used to. I am
wary not of what I say but the way I say it. Scientists and
engineers have a wonderful, civilised way of communicating with
each other, with respect, with reasoning. I always feel I am the
most brutal person in there. I'm trying to be nicer. I'm also
amazed by their commitment to high standards even for something
that is not visible.

Profile

Mari Velonaki is postdoctoral researcher and artist-in-residence at
the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of
Sydney. Born in Greece, she studied performance art in Switzerland
and new media art in Australia. She has a PhD in experimental
interfaces from the College of Fine Arts at the University of New
South Wales in Sydney. Fish-Bird is on show from 27 January until 1
April at the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania


Interview: How we tell right from wrong
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325937.100&print=true
* 07 March 2007
* Ivan Semeniuk

Audio: We devote a full episode of our weekly podcast, SciPod, to
exploring Marc Hauser's work on the "moral organ" and what it means
to our notions of justice and fair play. Listen to it here (mp3
format).

In a hospital emergency room, five critically ill patients
desperately need organ transplants. A healthy man walks in. Should
the doctors remove his organs to save the sick five? Most people
will respond in milliseconds with a resounding "No way". Now
imagine an out-of-control train about to run down five workers
standing on the track. There's a fork ahead, and throwing a switch
could divert the train to another line on which there is only one
worker. It's the same question - should we sacrifice the one to
spare the other five? - yet most of us would say "yes" just as
quickly. How do we make these lightning moral judgements? In his
latest book, Marc Hauser argues that this ability is evidence that
we are born with an innate moral faculty. He sat down to talk good
and evil with Ivan Semeniuk

What is your earliest memory of right and wrong?

My recollection is stronger about my children than for me. I have a
very strong memory of my eldest daughter when she was about 7 years
old. We were on the beach, and she was playing nicely by herself in
the sand when an older boy came along and gratuitously, it looked
to me, kicked sand in her face and made her cry. I grabbed him by
the arms, but when I realised I was squeezing very hard I just
stopped. To me that story captures this tension we have between an
instinctive, intuitive response to something wrong and a reflective
part that says: OK, wait a minute, is that what we ought to do in
this situation?

Are you saying there's a response to right and wrong that occurs
before you've had time to think?

Yes. When we are shown pictures of a face and of a rock, we know
we're seeing a person in one case and not in the other. Only after
that initial sorting do we reflect on what that face means. What I
call the moral faculty has that same aspect: we unconsciously
deliver a response to right and wrong - and I use "unconsciously"
in the same sense the linguist Noam Chomsky does in his work about
language. In other words, there's something about the biology of
our brains that has orchestrated a set of tools to build a moral
system.

That's a big claim. How do you go about demonstrating an innate
moral system?

We have to look for aspects of universality by studying damage in
the brain that may lead to specific deficits. We also look at
children and at animals to see if they show a precursor moral sense
similar to the full-blown one we see in adult humans. We look at
societal behaviour across cultures, too. Euthanasia is a good
example. Active euthanasia, or mercy killing, is legally blocked by
most western countries, whereas passive euthanasia, by terminating
life support, is legally supported. Why should that distinction
exist when the consequence is the same?

Some people justify honour killings - whether in the old South of
the US or in modern Pakistan. How could a universal moral sense
allow for action like this that other people find repugnant?

When biologists take a deep look at variation, they typically
uncover a set of underlying mechanisms that have extraordinary
power to account for variation. In the case of language, there are
universal principles and then there are parameters which are set by
local conditions. A lot of the variation in the moral sphere shows
in action instead of judgement. So an honour killing is what some
people in some contexts "do" in response to what most people would
agree was some sort of violation.

Do emotions play a role in our moral sense?

There's no doubt emotions play a role. The question is whether
emotions are causally necessary for moral judgement. Take
psychopaths: we know they have some kind of emotional deficit
because they don't seem to feel remorse or empathy for their
victims. Does this deficit corrupt their moral judgement because
emotions are necessary to make the right decision? Or is their
moral judgement actually intact, but their behaviour screwed up
because their emotions don't stop them from doing the wrong thing?
My guess is the latter - that emotions flow from moral judgements
and control behaviour.

Does the notion of fairness fit into all this?

There's a rich body of experimental literature to do with fairness
and how people negotiate in bargaining situations. One of the most
famous examples is the "ultimatum game", in which one person is a
donor and the other a recipient. The donor is given $10 and has to
offer the other person some part of that money. If the recipient
accepts, he or she gets what was offered and the donor gets what's
left. If he or she rejects what's offered, nobody gets anything.
The standard model in economics is self-interest, which argues that
the donor should give very little and the recipient should accept
it, however small it is, because something is better than nothing.

Is that what happens?

No. Most westerners feel that if the donor has been given this
money out of nowhere it's not fair to give away anything less than
about 40 per cent. When this game is played across cultures,
including in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies, you find the
principle of fairness coming through. What varies is how much the
donors give and what is rejected.

Does this tell us something about the evolutionary roots of our
moral sense?

Animals cooperate with kin all the time, but there seems to be a
flavour of cooperation that may be uniquely human, namely
reciprocity with genetically unrelated individuals. My guess is
that one of the things reciprocity requires is delayed
gratification. If I give you something, I've got to be patient to
wait for you to give me something in return and you have to avoid
the temptation of keeping everything instead of reciprocating.
Reciprocity among animals may be rare, not because it isn't
advantageous but because, psychologically, animals can't do it.

Are you saying our moral sense is a consequence of the ability to
think about the future?

Yes. Some aspects of what we see in the moral domain could be
by-products of evolutionary processes that have nothing to do with
morality per se. Our capacity for future-oriented behaviour has a
dramatic impact on what we do morally. This comes back to the point
about moral judgements versus actions. When most people think about
morality, they think about giving in to temptation. The ability to
foresee future rewards and avoid giving in is critical to morality.

Words like "temptation" suggest a link between our moral sense and
religion.

What interests me is the assumption that morality and religion are
synonymous. The evidence we have suggests that having a religious
background makes no difference to your moral judgement. Take the
runaway train problem or the organ donor case. A religious person
will judge those cases exactly the same as an atheist does. The
atheist could take this as an argument for the biological roots of
our moral system, while a religious person might argue God or some
divine power handed us the universality. What our investigations
also show, however, is that religious doctrines can't explain the
range and the subtleties of our moral judgements. For example, the
commandment "Thou shalt not kill" simply doesn't cover all the
variations people seem equipped to deal with.

Many people hope civilisation will move us ever on to higher moral
states. Is this an illusion?

I guess the question is: what's really changing? For me, it's
actions in the world. Current research shows, for example, that
racial attitudes and prejudices just aren't going away, no matter
how much we claim they are. This suggests innate biases. You're
never going to get rid of them if our moral sense is biologically
based. But we can have interaction between the intuitive and the
reflective sides.

So improving our society would mean both accepting our biology and
reflecting on it?

Yes. In the 1960s, the political philosopher John Rawls argued that
we should take the notion of moral intuition seriously, but added
that we had to enter into what he called "reflective equilibrium",
where we think about those judgements. What you call moving to a
higher moral state is where the reflective part comes in, and where
moral philosophers and legal scholars have their greatest impact.

Has researching our moral sense changed you?

I think so. After you've been in academia a while, you think "I am
living this great life", and while people may say what I do is a
contribution to society, teaching Harvard kids is so enjoyable it's
like a trip to the candy store. My wife and I travel a lot. We've
lived in developing countries and seen some horrible things that
happen in the poorer places of the world. I hope for a relatively
early retirement so I can work on morally relevant problems.

Profile

Marc Hauser is professor of psychology and of biological
anthropology and director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at
Harvard University. He is the author of The Evolution of
Communication, Wild Minds and, most recently, Moral Minds: How
nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong
(HarperCollins)


Interview: The shape of android robots to come
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526141.900&print=true
* 25 July 2007
* Alun Anderson

Hiroshi Ishiguro made waves last year when he built a robot twin of
himself. He had previously built equally realistic android copies
of his daughter and of a TV announcer. Less publicly, he is working
on a raft of other ideas, including sensor networks to give robots
better data about the world. So where is robotics headed? Even
Ishiguro doesn't know yet, but he loves exploring as many ideas as
Japan will fund - and being surprised as often as possible. Alun
Anderson talked to him

Why do you build androids?

These are not commercial products, they are testbeds for
understanding the important factors in human-robot interaction.
After this work on my "twin" I want to go back to a simpler kind of
truly human-friendly robot, but to do that I need to find the
principles of human-robot interactions. This is the approach we
have named "android science". If we improve human-robot
interaction, robots will be able to integrate into human society as
partners and have natural social relations with humans. Our brains
are designed for understanding other humans, not for manipulating
keyboards. We will be able to get more information more easily from
a human-like robot because it will tap into our innate abilities.

For robots to integrate into human society, do they have to look
exactly like humans?

No. Humans have a strong capacity to accept new kinds of
intelligent creature, so robots do not have to be human-like
androids. But it depends very much on the situation, the purpose
and even the culture you come from. Japanese people, for example,
like the idea of a human-like android as a companion and we are
quite serious about developing helper robots for old people.

Tell me about your most famous robot, your "twin", Geminoid HI-1.

Previously I built the "female" android, Repliee Q2, modelled on a
TV announcer. Back then, the fundamental issue was what provides
human-like appearance, human-like movements and so on (see "Double
take"). But people expect a human-like robot to be able to carry on
a conversation. We don't have the artificial intelligence to make
that possible now so I decided to develop a tele-interaction robot
that I can control in real time.

With Geminoid HI-1, I talk from my lab here in Osaka University and
my words come out from my "twin" in a lecture room at the Advanced
Telecommunications Research Institute on the other side of town. I
sit at this computer and in front of me are two screens showing the
view from the android's perspective. I can see the lecture theatre
and look down at the android's legs. It's programmed with my
characteristic gestures and I can control particular movements, so
people in the lecture theatre hear my voice and see my android body
move.

There are two big advantages of giving lectures remotely: I don't
have to travel and I can have a cigarette whenever I like without
anyone knowing.

Has your twin surprised you?

When I am tele-operating, it is very interesting what happens. The
true situation is that I am controlling a robot, but I feel
something. It's as though I am there. If I look at the robot's body
from this viewpoint, I feel as if the robot's body is my body. If
someone walks up and touches the robot face, I feel something.

Does that feel strange?

It is natural. The question is very philosophical: I think this is
my body, but my brain is here - a kind of mind-body separation.
Physically, my mind and body can be in different places. Is that
possible? Until we built this android we had no way to do this, or
to investigate the mind-body issue experimentally.

Would it upset you if someone else operated your twin's body?

No. In the beginning, my students were much better at operating my
body than I was. Once I had developed a copy of myself, a new issue
emerged: what is the difference between my observations of myself
and other people's observations? When I looked at my copy and it
was not moving, the experience was familiar because it was like
looking in a mirror. But when the students programmed in my
characteristic behaviours, I could not recognise myself as I have
never had the experience of watching myself carefully. My
understanding of myself is different from your understanding of me,
but I can still maintain my identity.

If robots are to integrate into society, surely you'll need massive
artificial intelligence inside their heads as well as making them
more human-like?

Not inside their heads. I'm running two kinds of project: one is
the robot, the other is the sensor network. There are many
artificial intelligence studies in computer vision but they are not
close to providing robots with human-level perception. Our idea of
a robot brain takes a different, distributed-cognition approach. If
we distribute many sensors in the environment to form a network,
then the robot can get the necessary information without any
complicated perception. This carpet you are standing on contains
pressure sensors in a network that can track human feet and tell
the robot where you are. There are also omnidirectional cameras
placed around the room which provide 360-degree visual information
to the sensor network, helping to track people and recognise their
gestures. The network provides the robot with perception, while the
role of the robot is representation, to interact effectively with
humans.

So while the conventional sci-fi robot would look at me from inside
"itself", your robots will look at me from every angle, even up
through the floor, while tracking everyone else in the room too.

Exactly. This framework doesn't limit itself to the physical
restriction of the robot's body. There is a perceptual information
infrastructure that is part of the total system, which we call the
network robot. I don't know when we will have many robots in our
society, but they should be the result of integrating ubiquitous
computing and robots.

I've heard criticism of this "network" approach because you'd need
to build sensor nets wherever robots operate. Is it widely
accepted?

I am open to different ideas, and recently the Japanese government
has become very encouraging of the network robot approach. Sensor
networks will allow robots to move easily among crowds without
running into people, which is a hard problem to solve with just
local sensors on the robot. Building sensor networks into big
public spaces would not be difficult. Such robots might work in
shopping malls directing people or explaining new products. They
might push your luggage trolley at the airport. Everyone expects
better service but it's hard to recruit people into these jobs in
Japan. Different kinds of robots will fuel many possibilities. The
key task is to find the killer application.

Double take

If my experience is anything to go by, when you meet an android you
should prepare for reactions outside your control. Walking across
Ishiguro's lab, I can see android Repliee Q2 in the distance.
Originally created from a body cast of a TV announcer, she seems
nothing more than a shop-window mannequin. Close up, I can see that
her skin is silicone rubber and I imagine the steel skeleton and
networks of pneumatic actuators that lie beneath it. But as
Ishiguro switches on the control computers, I am in for a surprise.
Repliee Q2 comes to life: she breathes, fidgets, gestures, blinks
and looks around her - movements copied from video analysis of the
real person's behaviour.

Then she makes eye contact with me and I unconsciously drop my
eyes, move to a more correct social distance, and blurt out an
instinctive "excuse me" for staring at her. And while the
incongruity of apologising to a brainless android is flashing
through my mind, I also notice that I've begun mirroring her body
posture.

My reaction draws a laugh from Ishiguro. "From our experiments
we've found something quite surprising," he says. "If a human
subconsciously recognises an android as a human, he or she will
treat it as a social partner even while consciously recognising it
as a robot."

So what are the key triggers for this subconscious process? Eye
movements are important, but finding a fuller answer is one goal of
Ishiguro's android science. That will make it possible to build
androids that aren't necessarily more accurate copies of humans,
but ones better able to elicit the reactions they need to fit
smoothly into a human-robot society.

Profile

Hiroshi Ishiguro is visiting head of the department of
communication robots at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication
Laboratories near Kyoto, Japan, and a professor in Osaka
University's department of adaptive machine systems.

Related Articles

* Meet my android twin
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225731.200
* 14 October 2006
* Robot special: Now hear this
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925372.000
* 4 February 2006
* The robots with a sense of self
* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426046.300
* 19 May 2007

Weblinks

* The research strands that make an android
* http://www.ed.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/research/research_e.html
* Video of Ishiguro introducing one of his androids
* http://www.ed.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/development/Android_ReplieeQ2_e.html
* The development of "network" robots
* http://www.ed.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/development/development_e.html


It takes a certain special feeling to click with robots
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325876.400&print=true
23 January 2007
Tom Simonite

No relationship is easy. If humans are ever to truly relate to
robotic companions and teachers, we'll have to ensure they trigger
a specific type of brain activity that we get from interacting with
real people. So say researchers who have shown that a robotic hand
can be made to activate the brain machinery partly responsible for
empathy with other humans.

Robots are increasingly entering our lives as companions,
educational aides and medical assistants. But till now no one had
probed whether the human brain responds to these automatons in the
same way that it does to human helpers.

To find out, Lindsay Oberman and colleagues at the University of
California, San Diego, decided to see what effect robots have on
mirror neurons (DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2006.02.024). These are brain
cells that fire not only when an individual performs an action, but
also when they see someone else perform that action. "Evidence
suggests these neurons are needed for mimicry, learning, language
acquisition and empathy," says Oberman.

The researchers recorded the brain activity of volunteers while
they were shown videos of a metallic, five-fingered robotic hand
opening and closing and grasping an object. They also recorded the
activity while a video of random static was shown.

The team found that videos of the hand triggered activity in an
area at the front of the brain containing mirror neurons, while the
static did not. This indicates that humans make sense of the
robotic action in the same way that they would if it had been
carried out by a human.

The discovery could trigger a new approach to robot design. In the
same way that the Turing test is about whether a robot can pass
itself off as human in a written conversation, brain scans of human
observers could form the basis for a "neural Turing test" that
would measure a robot's ability to engage our brains. "If we want
humanoid robots to teach or have other social functions, we need
them to trigger mirror neurons," says Oberman.

The next step is to work out which robot characteristics best
trigger mirror neurons. "I would like to see tests on a spectrum of
different humanoid robots that might tell us what it is that can
trigger this neural system, and to what degree," says Kerstin
Dautenhahn, who studies human-robot interaction at the University
of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK.

However, she warns, mirror-neuron stimulating robots could also be
used to unfairly influence thoughts and feelings. "It is not always
desirable to try and affect people in this way. We will need to be
careful."


Meet my android twin
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225731.200&print=true
12 October 2006
Ben Schaub

Poking your boss in the face is something few people would dream of
doing, but today researcher Shuichi Nishio puts aside his
inhibitions. He raises his index finger and jabs an unsuspecting
cheek. "What are you doing? No, no, no," mutters his target.
Undeterred, Nishio keeps up the harassment, moving his finger over
to the smooth-skinned chin. Watch the poking in action (2.5MB, wmv
format).

Despite appearances, the object of Nishio's attention is not a
person, but a robotic replica of Nishio's supervisor, Hiroshi
Ishiguro. The real Ishiguro watches this surreal scene unfold on
video monitors in a nearby room. He has piercing eyes, a frowning
countenance and long hair swept across a wide forehead, like a
Japanese Beethoven. So does his robot double, which Ishiguro is
controlling via the internet. When the roboticist speaks, his twin
moves its lips in sync and replicates his stern voice. "Don't do
that," it says in accented English. Ishiguro clicks a mouse, and
the robot sharply turns its head away from Nishio, blinking and
looking peeved. Watch a short video of Geminoid and his creator
joined in greeting (2.5MB).

The researchers are experimenting with their latest and strangest
creation at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories
near Kyoto, Japan. This machine, called Geminoid HI-1, is the first
of its kind. Unlike most humanoid robots, such as Honda's Asimo,
the whole point of Geminoid is to look as human as possible. Cast
from moulds of Ishiguro's body, its movements bear a striking
resemblance to his gestures and subconscious behaviours. As it sits
in the lab, its eyes dart to and fro and air-powered actuators -
small pistons and air bladders that expand or contract when air is
pumped in or out - shift its posture and make its legs fidget. The
HI-1 looks so human-like that passers-by are reluctant to touch it.
When Ishiguro sits next to it, one might mistake them for twins.

This is a startling demonstration. It shows that the field has
reached the point at which a robot can pass for human in appearance
- in limited doses at least. Boosted by recent advances in
materials, actuators and control algorithms, the race is on in
Japan, South Korea and the US to push the bounds of believable
robots and create a perfect android (see "Droids 'R' Us", below).
Some hope that these human-like robots will be welcomed more
readily than today's machines as helpers that will eventually be
able to care for the growing ageing population and work as
companions, particularly in robot-friendly Japan.

Ishiguro, a visiting researcher at ATR Labs and a professor at
Osaka University, has a different outlook. His group studies
interactions between humans and robots, trying to pinpoint which
social cues are important for getting along so that machines can be
built with more human-like qualities. Along the way, Ishiguro wants
to uncover exactly what it is that makes our appearance and
mannerisms... well, human. "My purpose is to know what it is to be
human by developing an android," says Ishiguro. "That is most
important and fundamental for me."

It is hardly a new quest, of course. Androids - robots designed to
look human - have populated science fiction for more than a
century. From the Robotrix of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to the
replicants of Blade Runner to the Terminator, fictional androids
fool our senses and pass for one of us. In the real world, however,
robotics and artificial intelligence researchers have mostly ceded
androids to the entertainment and theme-park industries. For
decades, the world's most advanced androids were probably the
animatronic Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland in California.

One reason researchers have shied away from building more
sophisticated androids is a theory put forward in 1970 by
roboticist Masahiro Mori. He proposed that our feeling of
familiarity increases as robots appear more and more human-like,
but that our comfort level plummets as slight defects in behaviour
and appearance repulse us, as if we are watching a moving corpse.
Mori called this effect the "uncanny valley". The term is widely
used by roboticists and has spread to the animation industry, where
it describes people's reaction to increasingly realistic digital
characters (New Scientist, 22 July, p 32).

Ishiguro sees the uncanny valley as territory to be explored and
then bridged. Growing up in Japan in the 1960s, he loved robots,
but it was art that inspired him, not engineering. He wanted to be
an oil painter until the realisation that he had mild
colour-blindness put an end to that ambition. At university he
studied the mathematics behind how computers can be made to
recognise objects. He went on to build a robotic guide for the
blind, and later, as an up-and-coming roboticist, he designed an
interactive wheeled humanoid called Robovie.

Throughout the 1990s, Ishiguro became increasingly interested in
giving robots a realistic human form so they could better
communicate with people. "Our brain is designed for recognising
people, not for recognising computers or objects," he says.
"Therefore I think androids would be an ideal information medium."
Karl MacDorman, an expert on human-machine interaction at Indiana
University's School of Informatics in Indianapolis, also sees a
cultural component to Ishiguro's interest; Japanese society is
perceived as being polite, mannerly and accepting of new
technology. "Most Japanese would rather ask an android directions
than disturb another person," he suggests.

By 2002, Ishiguro had completed his first android at Osaka
University. "Repliee R-1" was a small droid moulded in the image of
his then 4-year-old daughter. It could move its eyes, eyelids,
mouth and neck, but the movements looked jerky and unnatural, in
part because there were no actuators in the body. To boost realism,
Ishiguro collaborated with Tokyo-based animatronics-maker Kokoro,
which builds robots for the entertainment industry. In 2003, the
company provided him with a more lifelike, adult female droid,
animated by an air-powered actuator system. Repliee Q1 displayed no
facial expressions but could move its upper body in a smoother,
more natural way.

That got Ishiguro thinking. Androids, if convincingly human-like,
could serve as experimental "controls" to study human behaviour.
Their body language can be precisely programmed and reproduced, and
subtly altered to test which mannerisms are important for social
interactions. Applying these findings to building better robots
amounts to a new kind of Turing test: whether an android can pass
for human in appearance, rather than intelligence as the original
challenge dictated.

With that goal, Ishiguro's team studied videotapes of people
sitting and conversing, watching for subconscious
"micro-movements", the tiny shifts in position people make even
when they are sitting still. The researchers then reproduced those
movements in Repliee Q1. In one experiment, 20 people were asked to
check the colour of a cloth behind a screen that was drawn back for
2 seconds. They were not told beforehand that there was also an
android sitting behind the screen, 3 metres away and facing the
subject. Once the screen was back in place, the participants were
asked whether or not the figure was human. When the android sat
entirely still, 70 per cent of the subjects correctly reported that
they had seen an android. When Repliee Q1 made micro-movements,
however, 70 per cent reported that they had seen a human.

That sounds impressive, but the android still needed refining. In
2005, Ishiguro unveiled an upgraded Repliee at the World Exposition
in Aichi, Japan. The robot was modelled after Japanese television
broadcaster Ayako Fujii. A network of floor sensors and cameras
enabled it to detect the presence of people, while speech software
let it engage visitors in short verbal exchanges. The researchers
paid special attention to details, using pliable silicone skin and
real human hair styled professionally, while 13 air-powered
actuators in the robot's head let it display rudimentary facial
expressions. Another 39 actuators in the upper body enabled its
arms to move in a more lifelike way than the previous model. The
overall effect was so realistic that some visitors mistook it for a
real person.

Though the Repliee robots were starting to look more lifelike,
Ishiguro felt a bottleneck approaching. The droids' level of
artificial intelligence was too low to allow them to interact with
humans in more complex conversations. "We might be able to
compensate for this problem maybe within 100 years," says Ishiguro.
So he took a different tack, setting out to build an android that
could be more fully controlled by a human, with the aim of using it
in experiments to pin down the visual keys to human-like behaviour
and appearance.

Building a remote-control android in his own image seemed only
natural. With two jobs and a busy conference schedule, the ability
to be in two places at once was too good to pass up. Kokoro
supplied the same technology used in the Repliee bots, and earlier
this year Geminoid HI-1 was born. Its air-powered actuators are fed
by tubes that snake out of its bottom and are connected to a
refrigerator-sized air compressor hidden behind a screen. The HI-1
has 46 actuators in total, one of which is dedicated to maintaining
Ishiguro's famous frown.

The HI-1, like the previous androids, must remain seated; its legs
were only designed to produce micro-movements such as shifting and
jiggling rather than standing or walking. Nishio and the lab staff
studied Ishiguro's mannerisms on video and programmed them into
HI-1's stash of behaviours using custom animation software. The
android's appearance was cast from Ishiguro's face and body using
shape-memory plastic and plaster. The "skin" is made from silicone
with a layer of piezoelectric film that can detect pressure when
bent. At major joints such as the elbow, the silicone does not fold
the same way as human skin, so the metal skeleton is left uncovered
and HI-1 usually wears long sleeves.

To control the movements of his doppelgänger, Ishiguro sits at a
computer manipulating a mouse. First he selects whether the
android's state is listening, speaking or idle, and chooses its
mood - angry, disgusted or happy. Each state triggers about 20
autonomous behaviours, such as breathing, blinking and fidgeting.
Ishiguro can then choose an "explicit behaviour" such as bowing,
nodding or turning to the right or left. He speaks through a
microphone and headset, while an infrared camera system tracks his
lip movements with the aid of several markers placed around his
mouth. In real time, a computer maps the markers' locations in 3D
and generates corresponding lip-motion commands, which are
transmitted to the robot's actuators. A speaker behind the robot
broadcasts Ishiguro's voice.

The effect is striking, and Ishiguro thinks the HI-1 has finally
surmounted the challenge of Mori's uncanny valley. "Our robot is
not uncanny any more," he says. He is not alone in this view.
Robotics expert David Hanson, who has recently built realistic
android replicas of Albert Einstein's head and science fiction
author Philip K. Dick, agrees. "Ishiguro's work is brilliant and
ground-breaking," he says. "It is really important."

Other researchers, however, are sceptical that Ishiguro's approach
will lead to practical applications. "His work is interesting and
there is a place for it in the spectrum of humanoid research," says
James Kuffner of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "Ishiguro's robots are currently more
like electronic puppets, and unlike 'serious' humanoids designed to
do useful work." Some researchers also find Ishiguro's practice of
replicating himself and his daughter "narcissistic and in some ways
downright creepy".

Far from being deterred, Ishiguro says he is looking forward to the
day when he can stay home while his android double travels abroad
to speak at conferences. "I can avoid long flights that way," he
says. In the meantime, his group has had staff meetings in the lab
- with the robot representing its master. Even when he is out of
the country and the robot is shut off, interns are wary around it.
They think Ishiguro might be watching them.

The researchers are now trying to make the android move more
realistically. Its lip motions are slightly out of sync with
Ishiguro's, and they have a slow, unnatural look to them. Ishiguro
has discovered that he is adapting his own lip movements by
speaking more slowly. As a result he feels "disabled" when he is at
the controls, so Ishiguro's team is adjusting the system that
controls the robot's lips, trying to find a combination of lip and
facial motions that better suits the HI-1. "By analysing actual
human behaviours precisely, and by examining the effect of adding
or subtracting motion elements from HI-1's behaviour, we can see
which motion is contributing for what purpose, and their relative
importance in conversation," says Nishio.

For now, the HI-1 falls short of looking truly human. In fact
Ishiguro doubts they will ever create a perfect android. "Not in
100 years," he says. "Humans are very, very complicated." Though we
may have bridged the uncanny valley, the differences between
androids and humans are still obvious upon close inspection. For
instance, HI-1's eyes do not yet blaze like Ishiguro's, nor do they
look alive and wet like real eyes.

Perhaps this suggests something deeper about our pursuit of
androids. Nishio recounts an old Japanese tale about an artist who
never drew pupils in the eyes of the birds he painted. One day a
king asked why, and the painter replied that if he did, the bird
would fly away. The king didn't believe him and forced him to fill
in the eyes. The bird came out of the painting and flew away. "This
was something that came into my mind when I first saw the HI-1,"
says Nishio. "We are still not as good as the painter. There's
still more to go before our android can 'fly away' on its own."

Droids and Us

The race to build the perfect android is heating up. Japanese
researchers face competition from groups in the US and South Korea,
among others.

David Hanson builds androids as art objects, teaching aids and
attention grabbers at high-tech exhibitions. The latest creations
from his company, Hanson Robotics in Dallas, Texas, feature
expressive faces: 36 electric motors move actuators that stretch,
bend and fold a pliable skin-like material he developed called
"Frubber". Cameras in the eyes and face-recognition software track
nearby people, while speech recognition and synthesis software
combine to enable the droid to strike up a conversation.

In 2005, at the Wired NextFest Expo in Chicago, Hanson unveiled an
android replica of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. He also
built an animated Albert Einstein head for the Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, where it was
mounted on a humanoid robot body, making for a strange sight as it
stomped around the lab speaking with a German accent. Hanson is
completing his own Einstein droid, and this autumn he will ship an
"androgynoid" to the University of the West of England in Bristol,
UK, where it will be used in a cognitive science experiment on
gender perception.

There is no doubt about the gender of South Korea's "EveR-1". The
android is modelled after an idealised Korean woman in her early
twenties. In May 2006, the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology
(KITECH) unveiled the 1.6-metre robot to a room of Seoul
schoolchildren. Seated in a chair, the android bowed gracefully and
greeted its audience, while its lips and facial expressions moved
in time with a pre-recorded speech.

Creator Moon-Hong Baeg admits the robot is not as realistic as he
would like. Twenty electrically powered actuators move the arms and
torso, and the motion control is still fairly primitive. The face,
with 15 electric actuators under the silicone skin, is the most
convincing part, and is capable of expressing joy, anger, sadness
and happiness. The KITECH team has endowed EveR-1 with speech
software that recognises about 1000 Korean words. Baeg is now
developing a more realistic android called EveR-2.

Weblinks

See Geminoid being interviewed (66MB, WMV format)
http://www.irc.atr.jp/~nishio/geminoid/vids/20060723-ATRvideo-01-interview-eng.wmv
Ishiguro's Intelligent Robotics Laboratory
http://www.ed.ams.eng.osaka-u.ac.jp/


Memories of alien 'abduction' cause physical effects
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3395&print=true
12:44 17 February 2003
Shaoni Bhattacharya, Denver

People who believe they have been abducted by aliens show some of
the physiological changes associated with post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD), US researchers have found.

The researchers at Harvard University wanted to examine the
physical responses in people whom the researchers were certain
harboured false memories.

Their findings show that the physical intensity of a recovered
belief does not depend on whether the trauma was real or not.
Intensity cannot therefore not be used to judge whether a memory
was true.

Recalling their experiences of being snatched by aliens sent
people's hearts racing and caused them to sweat, psychologist
Richard McNally told the American Association for the Advancement
of Science's annual meeting in Denver.

People's seemingly far-fetched beliefs are sincere, he says: "The
heart rate and skin conductance [measuring sweating] was at least
as great in alien abductees as people with genuine trauma events."
The research underscores "the power of emotional belief", he says.

Sleep paralysis

McNally and colleagues examined the responses of 10 alien
abductees. All showed the heart rate and sweating changes
indicative of PTSD when recalling their experience.

However, the researchers were able to separate the abductees from
genuine PTSD sufferers by asking if they wished their trauma had
never happened. The abductees said no. Despite feeling frightened,
they felt a spirtual element to their experience, they said.

McNally says three key aspects appear to make people susceptible to
such memories. All had pre-existing "New Age" beliefs and a vivid
fantasy life.

But crucially all had experienced episodes of "sleep paralysis".
This occurs when a person wakes up during dream (REM) sleep, but
are unable to move their body. Often this is accompanied by
hallucinations. McNally says the same phenomenon could explain why
some people reports seeing ghosts.

Related Articles

Obsessive-compulsive disorder lined to piety
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2339
29 May 2002
Old Testament prophet showed epileptic symptoms
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1565
17 November 2001
Stress makes people more likely to create false memories
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn140
7 November 2000

Weblinks

Psychology, Harvard University
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/psych/
Post-traumatic stress disorder
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/posttraumaticstressdisorder.html
AAAS annual meeting
http://www.aaas.org/meetings/


Review: Love and Sex with Robots by David Levy
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626292.400&print=true
10 November 2007
Michael Bond

HAVE you ever imagined what it would be like to have sex with a
robot? David Levy sure has. In his new book, he predicts that
sleeping with robots will eventually become as commonplace as
sleeping with other humans. Indeed, we'll find it preferable, he
says, largely because of the robots' supreme love-making prowess.
In the robot age it will, apparently, be quite normal for couples
to own two robots - a malebot and a fembot - and for them to "enjoy
orgiastic sessions in which three or all four of them take part".

Levy seems deadly serious about all this, unless his new book is
some elaborate fantasy - he is, after all, president of the
International Computer Games Association. His expertise is
artificial intelligence and not, it seems, human relationships. His
enthusiasm for the carnal aspects of robotics leads him so often
into the absurd that it's hard to take his arguments seriously.
That is unfortunate, because the idea behind the book - a world in
which robots appear to be just like us - is fascinating. It raises
important questions about the future of robots, what we might want
from them and what our interactions with them might teach us about
ourselves.

Take, for example, the idea of a robot as a romantic partner - not
as far-fetched as it might seem, given how people today project
emotional qualities onto toys, objects and machines. It seems we
cannot help but experience an emotional response to certain
signals, even if we know full well that the signaller is not
sentient (New Scientist, 28 July 2007, p 46).

This raises the question: if your partner appeared entirely human,
would it matter if he or she was actually a robot? If you suddenly
discovered that your boyfriend's cognition was rooted in silicon
and steel rather than biochemistry, would it change anything? Some
AI experts think not. Ultimately, they argue, human reactions are
just as mechanistic as a robot's, except that the triggers are
biochemical. We may never know the difference. This thought
horrifies some sociologists, such as Sherry Turkle, who warn of the
dangers this seductive technology could heap on human interactions.
What happens to love, family and moral conscience if people prefer
robots to humans?

That wouldn't bother Levy one bit; indeed, he seems to favour it.
One can't help wondering why Levy is so down on human
relationships. He dedicates his book to "Anthony, an MIT student
who tried having girlfriends but found that he preferred
relationships with computers. And to all the other Anthonys past,
present and future, of both sexes." There's something tragic in
that.

In a few decades, Levy believes, we'll be able to program robots to
provide all the good stuff of relationships without the bad. If
that sounds too good to be true, it probably is. What Levy doesn't
acknowledge is that such a relationship would be unlike anything we
now know: how can he be so sure that we would enjoy it? Robot love
could be dull, unfulfilling or just plain weird. Empathy and trust
- key ingredients in any relationship - are built on a sense of
what we share with one another. The knowledge that our "perfect"
partner is battery powered might turn out to matter more than Levy
seems to think.

What's more, his assumption that we will be able to engineer robots
that display positive emotions or ways of thinking without the
negative aspects and yet still seem human requires a huge leap of
faith. Based on our current knowledge of the way emotions work, it
sounds like wishful thinking.

Love and Sex with Robots provokes all kinds of questions about
consciousness and emotions, about how we recognise ourselves in
others and about the extent to which behaviour reflects the
mechanics of the mind. Unfortunately, Levy fails to explore them.
Like a typical human, he's got one thing on his mind, albeit with a
twist.

Robots - Learn more about the robotics revolution in our
continually updated special report.

Related Articles

The shape of androids to come
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19526141.900
25 July 2007
It takes a certain special feeling to click with robots
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19325876.400
23 January 2007
Meet my android twin
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19225731.200
12 October 2006
Robots are our friends
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025572.500
26 June 2006
And they call it robot love
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18925341.600
14 January 2006

Weblinks

Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT
http://www.csail.mit.edu
MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
http://web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/techself
Why domestic robots aren't making a cultural impact, Spiked
Online
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA49F.htm
Sociable robots, New York Times magazine
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29robots-t.html
How soldiers relate to battle-field bots, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/05/AR2007050501009_pf.html


Robots are our friends
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19025572.500&print=true
26 June 2006
Kathleen Richardson

Robots as iconic images are associated with Star Wars and The
Terminator, yet they have more to do with politics than with
science fiction. The first robots were created in an age of
rebellious political and social upheaval. Eighty-five years ago,
the robot made its first appearance in the play R.U.R. (Rossum's
Universal Robots) written by Czechoslovakian playwright Karel
Capek. In R.U.R., robots are mass-produced to work in place of
people. The term is taken from the Slavic "robota", which means
forced labour.

R.U.R. was never made into a blockbuster movie, nor is it widely
known as the source of the robot. So when I hosted the Robot
Project - a festival of films, talks and art exhibits in Cambridge,
UK, last month - I made sure it featured performances of the play.

The play has striking relevance today, as roboticists are creating
humanoid robots, and the question of what makes us human is at the
forefront of many debates.

In Japan, predictions of labour shortages are funding efforts to
build more robots to help avert this perceived crisis. Many other
efforts in robotics, though, aim to create not mindless worker
drones but human-like companions for people. In the US, the field
of "sociable robotics" has emerged, and some researchers argue that
we are seeing the first steps in the creation of a companion
species of robots. Japanese roboticists also speak positively about
a future in which people will live side by side with animate
machines. All of this raises the question: can a human have a
meaningful relationship with a machine?

In the attempt to make human-friendly robots, aesthetics play a
major role. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I
conducted social anthropological studies, roboticists are creating
machines with human-like faces and bodies. The robot Mertz, created
by MIT's Lijin Aryananda, has a gentle face and large eyes, which
the maker deliberately designed to appear childlike. Mertz can
smile, frown and repeat sounds that are spoken to it. It is the
kind of robot that may one day be used to attend to elderly people.
In fact, elderly care by robots is under consideration as a
healthcare solution.

Robotic technology is surely still in its infancy. Technological
commentators such as Ray Kurzweil predict that intelligent machines
and robots will overtake humanity, but the possibility of robots
taking over the world or even performing simple chores remains very
much a fantasy. Honda's Asimo, for example, is renowned as an
advanced robot, but it is remote-controlled and can only perform a
limited range of pre-planned actions. The Ifbot robot, which is
meant to display more than 40 emotions, seems to spin these out
independently of what is going on around it.

Despite the simplicity of today's models, the field of robotics is
making a dramatic impact on our culture. The most important changes
have come not from the technology, but from the way we have begun
to question what it means to be human, and how humans differ (or
don't) from machines. This is highlighted by the debate over
whether it is possible for humans to have relationships with robots
in the same way they would with living creatures. Robotic toys such
as the Tamagotchi virtual pets or Sony's Aibo dog suggest that it
is indeed possible. In the case of the Tamagotchi, people have
described a feeling of loss at the "death" of their virtual pets,
and some have even taken their "dead" pets to specially created
burial grounds.

Children tend to display more relaxed distinctions between what is
human and non-human. This is not a particularly new observation -
Sigmund Freud wrote about it in The Uncanny over 80 years ago. But
what does it mean when adults relax the boundaries between human
and machine? To encourage adult interactions with robots,
roboticists deliberately design their robots to be childlike so
that human interlocutors lower their expectations and assist the
robot's development, as a carer would a child. It seems the meaning
of human-robot encounters has less to do with what the robot can do
and more to do with what the human is doing, prepared to do or
prepared to imagine is occurring in the encounter.

It is not just the field of humanoid robotics that is expanding;
there is a general shift to create sentient or emotional machines.
Why are we seeking to make our machines more like humans? Will
these new creatures be capable of substituting human beings, not
just as workers, but as companions too? As our machines take on
more human qualities, an interest in robot ethics is emerging - a
sign that people do believe we might relate to robots as we do to
one another. We have come a long way from the post-war fantasies of
domestic robots doing household chores.

"Sociable" robots display sentient and emotional cues on the
surface, but surely that is not enough to replace a human
companion. Then again, as an MIT researcher said, "All we know is
what is on the surface." We have no access to a fellow human's
internal world. If external signals comprise the entirety of our
interaction with humans, does it matter if they come from a human
or a machine?

Whether it is possible to have a relationship with a robot depends
on what we consider important in our human relationships. Does our
knowledge that another human has far more bubbling beneath the
surface than their smiles and frowns suggest allow for a more
genuine interaction? Or are a few smiles and frowns all we need? It
is not surprising that robot trials have shown much success in
elderly communities, where people are already socially isolated. As
our sense of human relationships diminishes, the possibilities for
robot relationships increase. Our culture's growing misanthropic
attitude feeds into the meaning we assign to our technology.

Our contemporary notions of the robot are a world away from its
original conception. The first robots, in R.U.R., are made of flesh
and blood and look indistinguishable from human beings. It was not
Capek who made his robots metallic or mechanical but other artists
in the 1920s and 1930s. The mechanical robot then became the iconic
image that symbolised the creature for the bulk of the past 85
years. In fact, this reinterpretation of his robotic creatures led
Capek in 1935 to write: "It is with horror...that metal
contraptions could ever replace human beings, and that by means of
wires they could awaken something like life, love or
rebellion...This dark prospect [is] either an overestimation of
machines, or a grave offence against life."

Capek feared that the robot was not being used to comment on
aspects of being human, as he had intended. Instead, people became
obsessed with the robot's machine nature - as they still are. In
our production of Capek's play, I wanted the robot to be human-like
as he had intended, allowing audiences to use the robot as an
impetus to explore what it means to connect with one another and
what it means to be human.

Profile

Kathleen Richardson is a social anthropologist at the University of
Cambridge. She has carried out research in robotics labs at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is now completing her
PhD and intends to continue her work exploring technology, human
relationships and questions of what makes us human.

E-mail me if you have problems getting the referenced articles.