Friday, January 20, 2012

Tech - Take tips from the arts to make robots come alive

 OK, robot, now you try <i>(Image: Art Montes De Oca/Photographer's Choice/Getty)</i>
OK, robot, now you try (Image: Art Montes De Oca/Photographer's Choice/Getty)

LIKE PCs, robots may soon become a key part of our everyday lives, but they present unique communication challenges that PCs do not. So roboticists are turning to people who have already solved many of these problems - actors, animators and dancers. Here, New Scientist brings you some of the artistic know-how that has proved useful.

MASKED THEATRE The 50-centimetre-tall, white plastic Nao humanoid (see photo) looks adorable. But with such a plain, rigid face - just two big lights for eyes and a pinhole of a mouth - how does the bot do it? Julien Gorrias, a "behavioural architect" at Aldebaran Robotics in Paris, France, which makes the Nao, had solved the same problem in his former life as a masked actor by using expressive body movements. "The whole body was involved in making the mask live," he says. His insights have helped give Nao a tangible personality. "You have to feel like it is someone," he says. "Not a human, but someone."

CARTOONS Humans can often guess what another human is about to do. To investigate how to make its PR2 robot (pictured, page 17) similarly "readable", robotics firm Willow Garage of Menlo Park, California, enlisted the help of the Pixar animation studio. Pixar's animated characters seem to anticipate their own actions: staring hungrily at a piece of cheese before grabbing it, say, creates the illusion of a thought process that makes a character believable. When the team created animations of the PR2 carrying out a task, onlookers were more certain of their interpretation of the robot's behaviour if its actions portrayed forethought. They also described the robot as more approachable.
Similarly, animated PR2s that appeared to react to the task's outcome - a 30-year-old tip from Disney animators - rather than just standing there dumbly, were viewed as more intelligent and capable, irrespective of whether they actually completed the task.

DANCE Humans naturally move in subtly different ways depending on their emotions and intentions, but unravelling how we do this in order to program it into a robot is tricky. Luckily, choreographers have already done some of the work, thanks to a system for characterising human movement dreamed up by Rudolf Laban in the 1950s. Laban theory describes how the timing, strength and angle of a dancer's movement will convey a different inner intention or emotion. Willow Garage is using Laban theory to understand how well this translates when similar motions are executed by a large robot.

http://www.newscientist.com/

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