Are we ready for robots?

 By: Laura Johnston    Monday, January 12, 2015     No comments

$16,000 Valdez Police Robot - 1984
"Used for working with kids.....There is a TV camera installed in it's head and a TV screen in it's chest with a VCR tape player and a cassette eight track player. Trin Delaney (the child in the photo) dances with EC-1."

 

Dr. Mari Velonaki is an artist and director at "Creative Robotics Lab" in South Wales, Australia. She and her team have studied and created artistic robots to interact with humans in museums. The team built "Diamandini" a slender, female robotic sculpture exhibit to attract human interaction. What Velonaki found was people were drawn to interact and even relate to the robotic sculpture by it's behavior and less by the way it looked. We designed Diamandini " to elicit a social and physical response from visitors. Velonaki says that, on average, about 80 percent of visitors reached out to touch the robot's hands, arms, or torso. She says that their current research involves adding a flexible, soft touch sensor that will let them record a broader range of physical interactions, from a subtle stroke to a hard push or poke."

Similarly, in Disaster city, Texas a disaster preparedness training site is using robots to respond to emergencies such as earthquakes, mudslides and outbreaks of disease. Like Velonaki's interactive robots, robotic emergency responders have to possess human like characteristics to make them relatable and communicative. They also have heightened hearing to detect lost victims in piles of rubble before triangulating a victim's location. The triangulation must be clearly conveyed to the human first responder. Ninety thousand emergency responders have come from all over the world to practice using these robots and/or their disaster response skills. These include climbing through piles of mangled steal, navigating through tunnels amongst rubble and interacting with robots.

 Can we really rely on robots to rescue our loved ones in disaster? Are we ready to embrace robots as a part of our daily lives? How do you feel about Velonaki's work? Is it art?