[tt] Heart Robot

[Donald P. Martin]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4426074.ece

 


Heart Robot: red hot date at the Science Museum


Times Journalist, Will Pabia interacts with a robot at the Science Museum

(Bruno Vincent)

Not the date Will Pavia was expecting

Will Pavia 

Hurrying towards my assignation with a robot that could understand human
emotions, I was quite excited. My ex-girlfriends say that I am incapable of
understanding human emotion and it was hard not to think of the incredible
impact this meeting might have on my personal life. 

Equally, it was hard not to see the earth-shattering importance of my date
with Heart Robot in the broader context of mankind's developing relationship
with machines. I had put on a clean suit and my lucky tie. I had purchased a
red rose. I had prepared an arsenal of robot chat-up lines: "I think our
systems are compatible"; "I'm like a machine in the bedroom", and so on. 

Would I need to confess my terrible history with technology? I am no longer
on speaking terms with my home computer and relations with my DVD player
have reached a state of irretrievable breakdown. It doesn't work any more,
no matter how loudly I shout at it. Nevertheless, as I headed to meet Heart
Robot, I couldn't help thinking that this time it would be different. 

We met in the Antenna Room of the Science Museum, where it quickly became
clear that all my preparations had been somewhat misguided. Heart Robot is
small and white, with sunken holes for eyes and little sign of a mouth. He
has pointed ears and a plastic torso padded with white cloth. He resembles
the love child of a monkey and an iMac. I shake his hand - for some reason
Heart Robot feels like a he - and knobbly plastic fingers grip mine. His
heart is signified by a red light beneath a translucent plastic diaphragm;
it beats a little faster as I grip his shoulder. 

The robot, main attraction of the Emotibots exhibition, which runs at the
museum until tomorrow, is covered in sensors that respond to movement and
touch. Treat him rough and he tenses, his hands clench, he blinks with
alarm. He can also register volume: he knows when you are shouting at him,
but irony passes him by. 

As he becomes accustomed to me his limbs relax and his heartbeat slows. His
eyelids flutter languidly, disarmingly. He cannot stand alone, however, so
his maker, David McGoran, a puppeteer turned robotics engineer, holds him
upright. It feels as if there are three people in this relationship. 

Mr McGoran believes that Heart Robot's emotional literacy will be the
pattern for future machines, be they toys, home computers, or technology
monitoring hospital patients. "It's a question of interface," he says. "If
you are shouting at your laptop and it has no idea then it becomes a useless
interface." I balk at the idea that my laptop might understand all the nasty
things I say to it. "Well, that's one of the questions we face," he says. 

In the vanguard of these developments are machines to monitor and help the
elderly, and children's toys. There is already a popular baby dinosaur
called Pleo, which responds when its little owners are cross. 

The development of these emotional machines will be influenced by the robots
of films and television, in a curious case of life mirroring art. Also at
the Science Museum was Matt Denton, 25, the animatronics engineer who built
the enormous hydraulic robot for the film Lost in Space and the Hippogryph
and the Fawkes of two of the Harry Potter films. 

"Animatronics engineers are a dying breed," he says. "We are being wiped out
by computer graphics." Many are moving into robotics, where their practical
ability to develop robots that appeal to humans is a marketable skill. 

Mr Denton serves as a consultant on the Heart Robot project. "I don't see
why we shouldn't be able to love a robot in the future," he says. 

Unfortunately, we are still some way from developing suitable robotic
girlfriends, and when we do they may well be based on the fantasies of men
such as Mr Denton. 

"Without a doubt the best robots are in Blade Runner, where they look
human," he says. One of them looked like Daryl Hannah. I decide to go home
and patch things up with my DVD player. It might yet offer me a vision of
future happiness. 

 

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