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which means, I was surfing the net. Yeah, really, that is research… only it does tend to result in very easy sidetracking, and also a tendency to become overwhelmed and demoralised by the sheer amount of stuff out there about robots.

So…

I decided that I need to work out a way to immediately categorise things I find into: interesting and useful for research; interesting; and not interesting. I was thinking about this because my basic problem is that I find most things “interesting” and of course if they’re amusing then that’s even better, so I end up trying to consider, or at least feeling that I should consider, all of these things as part of my research (not a good idea)!

The decision I made was that in order to be counted as “interesting and useful for research” the robot in question (whether fictional or factual) must be capable of interacting with humans. The robot should just be given “interesting” status if it simply interacts with the world in such a way as to make humans wish that it also interacted with them.

Now, I realise that this does not help to reduce the size of my research project that well, but strangely it does seem to help with my focus. I can now see that the following are “interesting”:

Theo Jansen

The Mascarillons

While these ones are “interesting” and at least might be “useful for research”:

Autonomous Light Air Vessels (see previous post)

Orirobotics

Of course, since they’re all “interesting” they might all turn up on this blog from time to time in any case!

One of the things I have found in my research so far is that artists seem to be more prepared to investigate human interactions with a wide range of forms than roboticists.  This is a huge generalisation I suppose, but there certainly seems to be more acceptance of the possibilities of a wide range of interaction types in installation or performance art.

Here, as an illustration, is a link to the Autonomous Light Air Vessels website.  These flying robot “creatures” form an interactive flock and in version 2 people can use mobile phones to communicate with either one ALAV or the group as a whole where this communication alters the individual or flock behaviour.

It is sometimes difficult to see the ALAVs reactions in the videos, but I find them fascinating, and would love to have the opportunity to interact with them myself.  The fact that they fly brings them close to some of my science fiction robot inspirations (more of these in a future post) and maybe this is why I am so drawn to these creations.

And here, just for fun, is the revenge of the robot arm from the previous post. Set to the Chemical Brothers song Believe, this one was pointed out to me by George after a conference presentation in which I showed the GM Advertisement.

So, as you can see from this General Motors advertisement maybe robots don’t need to be humanoid or to have faces in order to convey their feelings in such a way that they can be understood. (Although the music obviously helps in this video!)

I find this idea fascinating. I suppose it appeals to me because I am working to support the idea that robots could be of many varied forms, and yet still be able to take part in sophisticated human-robot interactions.

Cut from original image © Jared C. Benedict in Wikimedia Commons

The robot of the day is Kismet, designed and built at MIT. Kismet was probably one of the robots that first made me start thinking along the line of my current research.

In recent months my research has used Kismet mainly as an example of a robot where the concentration of design has been on the face. My research questions whether faces are a requirement for successful human-robot interactions, and more broadly, whether robots need to be recognisably human-like in order to support sophisticated human-robot communication.

In general, I would like to argue that in fact there are tremendous possibilities and advantages in using other forms for robot design.

An aside, just because I want to know what one looks like

This blog was created primarily to hold pages of information that I might want to direct people towards. For example, a curriculum vitae and academic portfolio information.

It is vaguely possible that I’ll get around to actually making posts to this blog as well. At least I feel better about this forum, rather than the university managed one that for some reason made me feel like BB was watching me.