The Age of Robots
We're close to making humanlike machines. It's time to reckon with the promises and perils
While many roboticists are focused on developing useful machines, a few like Mataric and MIT graduate student Brian Scassellati are more interested in what humanoids can tell us about humans. "Humanoids give us a platform for research," says Mataric. There's nothing like trying to build a simulation of a baby, for example, to show you just how much you don't know about how babies are built.
Scientists are also starting to use the machines to test theories and notions about how brains work. "There are some really nice models of how children learn basic social skills" but few ways to test them, says Scassellati, who has a special interest in autism. The robot he works on, a rugged-looking head and torso unit named Cog, is the product of almost 10 years of evolutionary development. Finally, says Scassellati, "we're starting to be able to look at these models [with Cog] and say something intelligent about them." Testing behavioral theories with a robot, he says, may provide a major advantage over computer simulations, the only other method presently available. "In building something I have to deal with the real social scenarios," he says, "not my idea of how social scenarios should work. In building something, I'm forced to get it right."
And not just right--approachable, too. These are social robots after all, so they won't be much use if they give people the willies. "We try to build something that looks enough like a person so that you could treat it like a person and you don't feel too weird about it," says Scassellati. Stephen Jacobsen, a University of Utah professor whose robotics company Sarcos makes amusement park automata as well as terrifically sophisticated humanoid robot bodies, says giving a machine the look of life is really quite simple. "First it's the movement, then it's the eyes," he says. Jerkiness is a sure turnoff. And as with the body, it's not always how real eyes look; rather, it's how they move. "If the eyes are at all awkward, people just don't like it," says Jacobsen. "But if they're graceful, people are intrigued."
If robots are ever going to live and work with us, they've got to look good, too. Some designers prefer the stylized, impersonal look of Robonaut or the sleekly modernist Japanese humanoid SIG. For the more truly social machines, designers have two options; they can go for the disarmingly goofy look of MIT's Kismet, or they can shoot for realism. At the Science University of Tokyo, Fumio Hara and his team study robot-human interactions using intricately constructed "face robots," mechatronic skulls complete with lifelike dentures and eyeballs. Silicone masks can be pulled over the underlying mechanism--transforming it into a famous athlete, for example. Nineteen different actuators pinch, push, and stretch the rubbery skin into myriad expressions, some of them human, some of them most decidedly not. Too much realism, it turns out, can be just as much of a social obstacle as too little. "As you start looking more and more like a person," says Scassellati, "you pass a certain point where it becomes scary and off-putting because it looks enough like a person and yet it's wrong."
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