Norihiro Hagita recently put a 3-year-old girl and her mother into a room with a robot and kept them there for two hours. At first, the girl and the robot chatted and played. When the robot asked her to give him a hug, she happily complied. But after a time the two of them ran out of new things to do, and the little girl plopped down on the floor for a nap. The robot waited to make sure the girl had truly lost interest, then approached her mother and struck up a conversation. "Now here's the interesting part," says Hagita, pointing to the girl on videotape. "See how she sits up and watches? The robot is interacting with her mother and that's got her upset." He can't help but grin. "The robot has made her jealous."
While engineers in most of the world try to make robots that perform specific and usually unpleasant tasks, from fighting wars to performing deep-sea salvage, Japanese engineers are obsessed with making the machines more human. Having put the country squarely in the lead of the industrial robot market for the past two decades, they're now working on a new generation of robots that will serve as playmates, pets and social workers. Says Hagita: "The goal is to build an intelligent environment for the symbiosis of robots and humans in everyday life. The real challenge is to come up with robots that can actually communicate with people."
Det er gratis at oprette en konto