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The robot tricks to bridge the uncanny valley
Giving robots a series of small behavioural tics can make help them appear a lot more human, which makes us feel more comfortable interacting with them
IF A robot bleeped and squeaked with personality like R2D2 from Star Wars, would you like it better? What if it glanced into the distance when you asked it a question, as though pondering its response?
Little behavioural tics like these could be crucial to people accepting robots into their everyday lives. Though they may seem small, such tweaks can help bridge the "uncanny valley", making the difference between a robot that looks eerily unhuman and one that people can easily relate to and work with.
To test the idea, Robin Read at Plymouth University in the UK has been imbuing robots with sounds that might elicit an emotional response from people.
Read and colleague Tony Belpaeme created two sounds: a chirpy, positive-sounding bleep and a melancholy whine. They then recorded footage of a humanoid robot – the Nao from Aldebaran Robotics of Paris, France – making each sound after being slapped, kissed, stroked or having its eyes covered. Then 300 people on the crowdsourcing website CrowdFlower were asked to rate how they perceived the robot's feelings after each action.
In general, people had a similar response to each sound. But the pair found that people were more engaged when the robot made a sound than when it didn't.
"It is enough to choose or generate a random sound," Read says, as that's all that's needed to inform someone that something important is going on. "It seems to be an easy way to provide rich expression for robots," he says. The findings were presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Bielefeld, Germany, on 3 March.
Sean Andrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his team have a number of other tricks to make a humanoid robot seem "alive". One is to introduce small random movements into a robot's head rotation motor, so that instead of appearing stationary, the robot's head twitches slightly now and then.
A face-tracking camera can ensure a robot always looks at the person it is interacting with, but instead of staring straight at their face, the team have programmed in a tendency for the robot to avert its gaze from time to time. The idea is to mimic the human habit of glancing fleetingly to one side when thinking of an answer to a question.
The team asked 30 students to assess conversations with Nao robots programmed to act like librarians or job interviewers, some of which had been set up for gaze aversion. They found that people thought robots that glanced around seemed more purposeful and thoughtful. The glances also led to fewer inappropriate interruptions in a conversation with the robot, Andrist says.
Gaze plays another key role. Using a PR2 humanoid robot, Ajung Moon at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that for people to feel comfortable when a robot hands them an object, it is crucial that they lock gaze first. Then the robot must look to the point in space where it plans to make the handover.
This can be improved further, says Anca Dragan of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She has been carrying out tests with a humanoid robot called Herb and has experimented with introducing a small delay to the robot-human handover. Just a few tenths of a second was enough to mimic a natural human hesitation, even if it made the overall handover feel less smooth.
It may seem less efficient, but people take to these small differences in robot behaviour, says Dragan. "Such handover motions have to match human expectations," she says. "You don't want the robot moving in ways that surprise or shock people."
This article appeared in print under the headline "Uncanny no more"
Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129610.100-the-robot-tricks-to-bridge-the-uncanny-valley.html#.UywnUKh_uN9
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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