杏吧原创

Duke is careering noisily across a living room floor resplendent in the dark blue and white colours of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He鈥檚 no student but a disc-shaped robotic vacuum cleaner called the . Not only have his owners dressed him up, they have also given him a name and gender.

Duke is not alone. Such behaviour is common, and takes myriad forms according to a survey of almost 400 Roomba owners, conducted late last year by Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter, who research human-computer interaction at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

鈥淒ressing up Roomba happens in many ways,鈥� Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying 鈥淥ur Baby鈥�, indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. 鈥淲e just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery,鈥� she says.

Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. 鈥淧eople want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that鈥檚 much more than a gadget,鈥� she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.

Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs 鈥渄ull, dirty and dangerous鈥� jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung鈥檚 observations suggest that we have moved on. 鈥淚 have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it,鈥� she says. 鈥淲ith skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect.鈥�

The Roomba, which is made by iRobot in Burlington, Massachusetts, isn鈥檛 the only robot that people seem to bond with. US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm鈥檚 gripper to hold their rod.

鈥淯S soldiers in Iraq admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed鈥�

Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it鈥檚 the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. 鈥淓ngineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones 鈥� and try to design robots that promote them,鈥� says Sung.

To work out which kinds of robots are more likely to coax social responses from humans, researchers led by Frank Heger at Bielefeld University in Germany are as they interact with robots. The team starts by getting humans to 鈥渕eet鈥� four different 鈥渙pponents鈥�: a computer program running on a laptop, a pair of robotic lego arms that tap the keys of a laptop, a robot with a human-shaped body and rubbery human-like head, which also taps at a laptop, and a human. Then the volunteers don video goggles and enter an MRI machine. While inside the machine, a picture of the opponent they must play against flashes up inside their goggles.

The game, a modified version of the prisoner鈥檚 dilemma, asks volunteers to choose between cooperating with their opponent or betraying them. As they can鈥檛 tell what their opponent will do, it requires them to predict what their opponent is thinking. The volunteers indicate their choice from inside the scanner using a handset that controls their video display. The team carried out the experiment on 32 volunteers, who each played all four opponents. Then they compared the brain scans for each opponent, paying particular attention to the parts of the brain associated with assessing someone else鈥檚 mental state, known as theory of mind. This ability is considered a vital part of successful social interactions.

Unsurprisingly, the team found that neurons associated with having a theory of mind were active to some extent when playing all opponents. However, they were more active the more human-like their opponent was, with the human triggering the most activity in this region, followed by the robot with the human-like body and head. The team says this shows that the way a robot looks affects the sophistication of an interaction.

Not surprisingly, though there are similarities between the way people view robots and other human beings, there are also differences. and colleagues at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, showed people videos of robots in action and then interviewed them. He says that people are unwilling to attribute intentions to robots, no matter how sophisticated they appear to be.

Further complicating the matter, researchers have also shown that the degree to which someone socialises with and trusts a robot depends on their gender and nationality (See 鈥淓nter the gender-specific robot鈥�).

These uncertainties haven鈥檛 stopped some researchers from forming strong opinions. , a psychologist at Stanford University in California, is sceptical about humans ever having sophisticated relationships with robots. 鈥淩oboticists should admit that robots will never approach human-like interaction levels 鈥� and the sooner they do the sooner we鈥檒l get a realistic idea of what people can expect from robots.鈥� He says that robots鈥� lack of desire and free will is always going to limit the way humans view them.

But Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University in Japan thinks that the sophistication of our interactions with robots will have few constraints. He has built a remote-controlled doppelg盲nger, which fidgets, blinks, breathes, talks, moves its eyes and looks eerily like him (New 杏吧原创, 12 October 2006, p 42). Recently he has used it to hold classes at his university while he controls it remotely. He says that people鈥檚 reactions to his doppelg盲nger suggest that they are engaging with the robot emotionally. 鈥淧eople treat my copy completely naturally and say hello to it as they walk past,鈥� he says. 鈥淩obots can be people鈥檚 partners and they will be.鈥�

Robots 鈥� Learn more about the robotics revolution in our continually updated .

The Human Brain 鈥� With one hundred billion nerve cells, the complexity is mind-boggling. Learn more in our cutting edge special report.