MIT researchers released Boxie into different environments around the university where it would autonomously engage in interactions with people that were hanging around. People could either agree to participate in Boxie’s documentary about MIT by pressing a green button on one of its sides or they could a make sad-sounding Boxie go away by pressing a red button on its other side.

Making use of its interactive robotic camera, Boxie can be used as an autonomous method for capturing structured documentaries and, while story gathering was the bot’s most overt goal, researchers at the media lab were also viewing the project from another perspective. The MIT Media lab is known to carry out research that is often considered unorthodox. Usually it focuses in on the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life.

¨We hope that this type of interaction that we studied will lead to simpler systems that may be more symbiotic with people… using this simple emotional tie to create better systems and better interactions for people¨ Explains the MIT representative in the video above.

What makes people favour a bot like Boxie over one that displays cold mechanical mannerisms and where might robots with this kind of gentle of behaviour be most useful?

If you’re interested in finding out more about new kinds of social robots, check out the European initiative, Robot Companions for Citizens.

The video above features a special performance of a Shakespearean classic put on by Texas A&M University several years ago. The students and professors involved in the production thought this would be a great way to see how people respond to and interact with robots.

Presently, there are quite a number of studies which are investigating human-robot relationships. The recently completed European project SERA (Social Engagement with Robots and Agents ), aimed to advance the social acceptability of robots by collecting data on real-life, long-term relationships of subjects with robotic devices. A current European project, LIREC (Living with Robots and Artificial Companions), is also geared towards investigating social interaction with robots yet, some scientists suggest we look elsewhere than the lab for clues on how to improve our experiences with robots….

Literature, theatre and film portray a vast array of human relationships.  An Immortal literary icon like Shakespeare was an expert in unraveling the many aspects of human behaviour. Similarly, today’s roboticists have become very interested in picking apart the smaller components of human interactions in order to make our future experiences with robots as comfortable and natural as possible. From operas to poetry, artistic productions expose all sorts of human relationships in great detail but how can we extract useful information from such works and apply it to robotics?

Researchers from the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Vienna, Austria suggest we do the following:

First, identify relevant scenes from various media. This could include anything from Greek tragoidia to modern day classics like metropolis and ET, however they suggest selected scenes be centred around characters which are engaged in a servant-master relationship. Those scenes would then be carefully analysed; identifying who does what, when and looking at the reactions that ensue. Next, they recommend different types of behaviours be categorized. This could result in categories of behaviours that are important to consider for robot demeanor but may otherwise be left out of conventional psychological typologies ( for example unobtrusiveness). Finally, this information should be integrated into existing personality models for humanoid robots.

For more information on this, you may want to have a look at the paper: Robots as Companions: What can we Learn from Servants and Companions in Literature, Theater, and Film? This paper is part of the proceedings from FET 11  (the European Future Technologies Conference and Exhibition 2011) which also featured Robot Companions for Citizens as one of the 2011 Flagship Initiatives.

Turkle stresses that although we are still very far from the point where robots are indistinguishable from humans- as in the movie Blade Runner, based on Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- humans are capable of forming attachments to robots. During the interview Turkle discusses some of the issues raised through her studies with Cynthia Breazeal, founder and director of the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab.

Turkle’s most recent book   Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2011)  explores some of the effects of a host of digital technologies; from new forms of social media, to sociable robots akin to the ones discussed in the interview above.

Turkle predicts that future robots will be ¨fantastic creatures,¨ capable of helping humans in many important ways; however, she is firm on her opinion that humans cannot love robots and that such machines will never be capable of love because they cannot be included in the arc of a human life cycle, experiencing things like birth, death, and loss.

Regardless of her belief, she shares an account of the impressive moment she had with MIT’s robot Cog. She describes  the uncontrollable feeling of wanting the object’s attention in spite of knowing that it had no ¨real¨attention to give her. Considering this a deeply impacting experience, Turkle believes the issue of attachment between  humans and machines is something that should be followed with close attention.

David Levy on the other hand would disagree with Turkle’s views on love and robots. Although he has taken his share of criticism, he was right on his prediction in his 2007 book   that sex with robots would be made possible and he thinks we could love them too. Check out this article in  Scientific American that discusses some of his views published in his book Love and Sex with Robots.