Welcoming a lone robot like a Roomba vacuum cleaner into your home is no challenge and becoming more common.
But researchers in the UK are thinking about the problems of accommodating a whole staff of robotic servants with different tasks, bodies and features. Controlling a varied team of them could, the British team fear, be as time-consuming and demanding as being the major-domo of a collection of human servants.
They think the answer is to give all the robots on a household staff a single artificial 鈥減ersonality鈥� that jumps from one to another, giving the mistress or master of the house a single, familiar interface to interact with.
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Divided attention
To test the idea, at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, UK, and her team have created an ideal robotic home in a typical British suburban semi-detached house with around ten rooms across two floors (see video).
The house has around five robots of varying shapes and sizes on the staff, as well as computer screens displaying a graphical companion called Greta, which allows the human residents a different way to interact with the robots. But such a high-tech environment might overwhelm the average person, Dautenhahn says.
鈥淪tudies show that people aren鈥檛 very good at dividing their attention among dozens of objects,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t can be confusing having various machines in your house all operating simultaneously 鈥� are they actually doing what I told them to do?鈥�
Head butler
Dautenhahn and her team decided to simplify things by creating a single interface that acts like a head butler, accepting commands from the homeowner on behalf of all the subordinate robots and answering questions.
But if that interface was tied to one 鈥渂utlerbot鈥�, the homeowner would have to seek out that particular machine whenever they wanted their robot staff to do something. Furthermore, all the other machines in the house would be unhelpfully mute if accosted by the homeowner.
To get around that problem, the robotic 鈥渉ead butler鈥� function can jump from machine to machine, so that at any point during a domestic chore the homeowner can accost and question the machine that鈥檚 in action.
Essence of robot
鈥淚f it [the 鈥渉ead butler鈥� interface] reaches the limit of what it can do itself, it will move to another machine and then back to the machine near you,鈥� explains Dautenhahn. 鈥淪o, for example, it can tell you it鈥檚 been able to pick up the towels from the bathroom.鈥�
In their initial experiments, the 鈥渉ead butler鈥� resides in only one machine at a time, so just one robot is active at any given moment.
Flipping control from one robot to another is not straightforward, though. Jumping between robots with very different physical designs, and even to cellphones to allow the homeowner to take their 鈥渂utlerbot鈥� with them on holiday, creates what the team dub 鈥渇ormat issues鈥�.
There is also the question of what to transfer. For example, detailed knowledge of the control of the robotic vacuum cleaner doesn鈥檛 need to migrate to the dishwasher. On the other hand, it鈥檚 important to make sure that the homeowner still feels they are interacting with the same essence even if it鈥檚 moved to a very new robotic 鈥渂ody鈥�.
Bipedal stance
The arrival of the personality in a new robot might be indicated by a characteristic behaviour, says Dag Syrdal, a psychologist at Hertfordshire working on the project.
For instance, if the essence normally resides in a humanoid robot but has to switch to a robotic dog, the dogbot might suggest the transition has occurred by trying to stand on two legs.
鈥淏ut what I think is really important is to nurture a relationship between the user and the robotic agent,鈥� Syrdal says. There have been studies showing how the interaction with a virtual agent is enhanced if the computer character becomes friendlier with time.
Syrdal hopes to design ways that each robot can give hints of the long-term relationship between the user and the core personality.
The Hertfordshire team鈥檚 work is part of a Europe-wide project, , that aims to move robots out of the lab and into the home.
