| Unrequited robot love to be investigated |
| Written by Lautaro Vargas | |
| Wednesday, 16 April 2008 | |
![]() WIRED NextFest exhibition visitors playing with a swarm of GlowBots. Pic credit: SICS The new European project called LIREC – Living with Robots and Interactive Companions – aims to create a new generation of interactive, emotionally intelligent, companion technology that is capable of long-term engagement with humans in both a virtual and real-world, advancing the relationship between robots and humans. In addition to advancing the technology of robotic companions in LIREC, the team will take a critical perspective and address ethical and psychological issues regarding companions. Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, the principal investigator at the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Computer Science, says this type of investigation is essential in an area where people may bond and actually develop relationships with machines which are not able to reciprocate this emotion in a meaningful and deep way. “Regardless of how the robot looks or behaves, we must not confuse machines and people,” said Prof Dautenhahn. “Humans, dogs and other creatures have authentic emotions. We want to avoid a situation where a person deeply bonds with a robot but the robot simply doesn’t care.” Funded by an EU FP7 grant, the four and a half year, £6.5m project will also be the first in the world to examine how people react to a familiar companion entity when it swaps from a robot body into a virtual form, for example on a computer screen or your PDA. It is being led by Queen Mary, University of London, involves 10 partners from seven countries and will run for four and a half years. The Hertfordshire team, which took the robot out of the laboratory and had it living in a house nearby, will investigate specifically how people can interact with robots of different appearances and behaviour, and how a robotic ‘mind’ can migrate to other robots or computer devices. “We’re interested in how people can develop a long-term relationship with artificial creatures, in everyday settings,” said project coordinator, professor Peter McOwan, from Queen Mary’s Department of Computer Science. “You may not be able to find a robot that can help you do the dishes anytime soon, but we’re hoping to explore how such friendly future technology could be developed and start to predict what the intelligent machines of tomorrow might look like, and how we should treat them.”
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