Robots Get Emotional, Social Too

by Steve O'Keefe on November 1, 2010

One of the most difficult challenges for robot designers is to give the machines realistic emotional responses to human beings. ScienceDaily reports on a breakthrough in robot vision that allows robots to see and react to human facial expressions.

The researchers, Wei-Po Lee, Tsung-Hsien Yang and Bingchiang Jeng of National Sun Yat-sen University, have now turned to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and to endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.

The neural networks allow robotic pets to learn based on visual and audio cues given off by their owners. For example, pets can learn their own names, respond only to the voice of their primary caretaker, and react to facial expressions such as smiling, frowning, or blinking.

Engadget’s prolific associate editor, Ross Miller, recently played with a new robot teddy bear manufactured by Fujitsu but not yet available on the market. The bear responds to a variety of visual cues through a camera in its nose. For example, it can see people waving at it, and will wave back.

This new breed of mechanical companions are called “social robots,” for their ability to respond to environmental signals. Parag and Ayesha Khanna explain the concept in a post a few days ago on the BigThink blog:

They will ‘respond’ and ‘react’ to us, which will make us care for them much as we care for pets and other humans. Eventually, almost all robots will have this interactive social side to them.

One of the earliest robot pets, Pleo, has been given a makeover for the 2010 holiday season. Shane McGlaun, a gadget geek who writes for a number of tech trend sites, including DailyTech and the Gadgets Weblog, recently filed a review for SlashGear on the revamped robot dinosaur, dubbed “Pleo RB” for “Pleao reborn”:

The new design also knows the time of day and will alter its behavior to suit the time of day by wanting to be fed in afternoons and being sleepy at night.

Robotic pets are ripe for Minitrends adventures. As ScienceDaily reports, one of the struggles with the popular playmates is to advance the technology as quickly as consumers expect new features. Conditioned by films such as Avatar, consumers demand a lot from their robot companions. Inventors struggle to keep pace, knowing that they will have only a short time to earn back their investments before the public loses interest in outdated features.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Emotional Robot Pets,” ScienceDaily, 09/20/10
Source: “Fujitsu’s social robot bear is the supertoy of Kubrick’s dreams, almost,” engadget, 10/05/10
Source: “Loving Robots – Come On, You Can Do It,” BigThink, 10/30/10
Source: “Innvo Pleo baby dinosaur gets updated and new colors,” SlashGear, 10/18/10
Image by Travis Isaacs, used under its Creative Commons license.

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