This robot is clearly up to no good.
Humanoid robots will one day be widely deployed in environments such as homes, businesses and cities, which are all built to accommodate adult humans of a certain size and weight. As robots become more common in our lives, it only makes sense that they will take on a humanoid appearance that will enable them to efficiently navigate spaces where humans live, as well as enable humans to interact with them in a manner similar to how we would interact with a biological person.
That said, if we have large, powerful machines working in close proximity to us, we’ll want to make sure there are built-in safeguards that will ensure robots won’t inadvertently cause property destruction or physical harm.
Part of this safeguarding will relate to the physical operation of the robot. For example, robots will require ways to measure contact pressure to know when it is being touched and how much pressure is being applied, as well as how much pressure it exerts when it holds something.
More interesting, however, is the essential role of communication between humans and robots, particularly of the non-verbal sort. Not only will robots need to be able to read the faces of humans, but will, in turn, need to have “faces” capable of communicating, themselves:
Merely making a robot smart enough to know it’s being told not to do something is not enough, says [Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK]: “Safe interaction needs a lot more than speech and language processing on the part of the robot.”
The Bristol team is developing facial interaction routines that make it clearer what a human is can expect of a robot they are cooperating with. For instance, when someone passes something to a robot, its eyes should lock onto to the object being handed over, so the human knows it is taking an interest in it.
In addition, Melhuish suggests the range of robot facial expressions should include one of “bemusement”. That would signal to humans that the robot is unclear about its task, and may be about to perform an unsafe manoeuvre – not grasping a hot cup of drink properly, for example.
You can see examples of the CHRIS (Cooperative Human Robot Interaction Systems) Project’s work, which features several examples of humanoid robots (including the above-pictured iCub), here.