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6-Legged Robo-Dogs? The Elderly and Biological Inspiration
6-Legged Robo-Dogs? Or maybe not. Those are two different articles, but it would be cool! Anyway, the first is a slightly old feature on the NY Times talking about biological inspiration from insects; Trade Secrets of the 6-Legged Set. The motivation for copying insects is obvious. They have extremely efficient, fast movement with very little brain power, so the design must be good. Indeed, animals/insects can usually stabilise themselves without really thinking about it. Humans also walk without really thinking about it. In practice, this would involve adding more flexibility to our robots, rather than making them rigid steel, which would make them more suited to their environment. The second article is about the elderly, and the somewhat annoying Aibo dog, as 'Spot' Goes High-Tech. The feature describes a session with some octogenarians, and how they reacted positively to the robot -- truly believing that he was a conscious entity, capable of feeling emotions towards them. The developers obviously are quite happy with this, since there are only a few fixed sounds in there!! It just goes to show that it's not all that hard to build a fake dog ;) | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Wednesday 17 April, 15:37 Reply
Snoop doggy That AIBO dog article was interesting. I've never actually seen one of those robots for real, but I would guess that they aren't all that complicated and probably have a limited repertoir of stereotyped movements and sounds. I was thinking that in a way this is really a sort of modern Turing test. If people other than twentysomething techno addicts are prepared to treat the robot as if it's a dog and assign motivations and intentions to it over a prolonged period of time then you might as well consider it as having a similar intelligence level as a dog. To some extent the old folks are simply imposing their own beliefs on what is probably just a sophisticated type of toy, but then we all do something similar with babies - assigning intelligence levels and intentionality where probably none yet exists. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Wednesday 17 April, 17:53 Reply
Ageing with Bots There's another similar story in the NY Times, where the link with the elderly is looked into further. Such a Comfort to Grandma, and He Runs on Double-A's Once they have the elderly audience fooled, then they'll tackle the small kids, and finally the sceptical pesimistic adolescents of the current generation... A challenge! | Alex J. Champandard 935 posts. Saturday 20 April, 17:09 Reply