The Delicate Art of Making Robots That Don t Creep People Out

jordany (25)in #news • 4 years ago

The robot Digit stands approximately five feet, four inches high, with a metallic torso the teal color of a hospital worker’s scrubs. It can walk up and down staircases and around corners on two legs, and lift, carry, and stack boxes up to 40 pounds with arms whose hinges evoke the broad shoulders of a swimmer.

Agility Robotics, Digit’s manufacturer, shipped roughly 30 of these robots earlier this year to industrial and academic clients. The robot is designed to labor alongside human workers in industrial spaces like warehouses and factories, and the Albany, Oregon-based company expected that the initial feedback would focus on Digit’s mobility and functionality.

It did not anticipate a swift early consensus that the robot gave people the creeps.

“We’ve unfortunately gone a little bit into the uncanny valley there, with something that people identify as being wrong,” said Agility co-founder and chief technology officer Jonathan Hurst, a professor of robotics at Oregon State University.

“We don’t need [a head] for functionality. But… it effectively is necessary for functionality if you consider humans working with it and accepting it as part of its necessary function.”

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Digit is meant to navigate spaces originally constructed for human workers, and so its form follows that of the human body — at least, from the “shoulders” down. Rising above its torso like a human neck is a black cylinder that houses the robot’s lidar sensor. Above that, there’s nothing. Digit has no head. And if it’s going to work alongside people and not make them uncomfortable, Agility now believes it needs to have one.

“We don’t need [a head] for functionality,” Hurst said. “But… it effectively is necessary for functionality if you consider humans working with it and accepting it as part of its necessary function.”

The oversight underscores a compelling challenge in robot design: The way a robot makes people feel can matter at least as its ability to complete its tasks. And given that humans read an extraordinary amount of nonverbal information in one another’s faces, a robot’s head or face can have outsize impact on the way users perceive it.

When creating a robot that will interact with people, be they residents of a nursing home, customers at a restaurant, or co-workers in a warehouse, designers have to walk a fine line between features that can be anthropomorphized enough that humans feel comfortable, yet not so realistic that the robot tumbles into the “uncanny valley” of creepily lifelike tech. They have to create robots that remind humans of themselves but that also make clear they’re not human, just machines with discrete and limited functions. A recognizable head or face can offer an approaching human all kinds of nonverbal clues about the extent of a robot’s abilities and what its next move will be. And should the designer intend it, those same design principles can also be used to deceive.

Even if a robot isn’t intentionally designed with a face, people will seek one out. Though Nicholasville, Kentucky-based Badger Technologies deliberately made its aisle-roving, shelf-scanning grocery store robots as simple and unobtrusive as possible, observers have pointed out that its glowing twin information lights (blue when operating normally, red when the robot is bumped) bear an unfortunate resemblance to evil eyes. (Think Buzz Lightyear’s nemesis Emperor Zurg, from Toy Story.) The company’s main client, the supermarket chain Stop & Shop, attempted to solve that problem by outfitting their robots with googly eyes.

“It’s really hard for people not to see faces,” said Maya Cakmak, an associate professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Human-Centered Robotics Lab at the University of Washington. “Our vision system is designed for detecting faces, so we detect them everywhere, even when they aren’t there.”

The name for this phenomenon is called pareidolia: the unconscious tendency for humans to organize ambiguous visual information into something recognizable, like seeing a shape in a cloud or a face grinning back at you from a plank of wood, a soap dispenser, or a robot’s cameras.

Humans derive an enormous amount of nonverbal information from faces. We infer emotional states from people’s expressions, and follow their gaze to determine their intent or take instructions. People make unconscious assumptions about others’ personality traits from their faces alone.

When it comes to robots, that unconscious expectation of seeing a recognizable face — and the subtle sense of frustration or unease when it’s not met — becomes more pronounced the more humanoid a robot is. Plenty of robots used in industrial settings don’t have a recognizable equivalent to a head or face, and human workers don’t care. A robot that evokes as much of the human form as Digit does, however, doesn’t get that same pass.

Robots have no emotional states or personalities, but that doesn’t stop us from projecting onto them. (And given the difficulty and expense of mechanically reproducing the flexibility of a human face, most robot faces are rendered on screens.) In a 2018 study, Cakmak and her colleagues found that people rated robots as more “friendly” the more human-like facial features they had, and cited those without mouths or pupils as significantly more “creepy” and “untrustworthy” — or “soulless,” as one participant put it. The presence of robot eyelids also triggered strong feelings, with subjects describing the robots as “sly” and “smug.”

A robot face can have practical uses. A pair of eyes gives people a sense of the robot’s “gaze,” or where its attention is oriented. The direction “pick that up,” Cakmak said, is meaningless unless accompanied by some visual gesture that indicates what “that” is.

Placing cameras or sensors at the highest point on the robot’s form gives it an unobstructed view, just like the eyes on a human face. A face can also help human users quickly distinguish the robot’s front from its back. Depending on the design, it can signal to users what information the robot has received, or just whether it’s on or off.

Dublin-based Akara Robotics, which developed Stevie, a socially assistive robot designed for eldercare facilities, chose to make the brown eyes on Stevie’s screen face blink occasionally when the robot is on standby, just to let people nearby know that the robot is still on.

When it comes to technology that humans must interact with, “whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to anthropomorphize it,” said Akara CEO Conor McGinn, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin and Stevie’s chief designer. “There’s common ground between the tech and the person that isn’t there if it doesn’t present in an anthropomorphic way.”

The absence of a head didn’t initially bother Digit’s creators. The Agility team was more focused on the challenge of perfecting the machine’s bipedal locomotion — in other words, making it walk really well.

Their efforts paid off. Digit’s steady and agile gait is an engineering triumph. “It’s by far my favorite of the bipedal robots,” McGinn said. Yet even a robot’s walk can trigger emotions in observers. Agility is planning tweaks to the next revision that will change the “clank clank” sound of the robot’s gait, which sounded to some early users like an angry stomp. But it still has to make some sound, or it could be perceived as sneaky. Digit will be working alongside people, and a good co-worker doesn’t sneak up on you or stomp around menacingly.

“One general theme is that if a robot surprises somebody, it makes them pretty uncomfortable,” Hurst said. “But that’s also true for another person. If someone’s behavior surprises you or is unpredictable, it’s the same mechanism, I think, that makes people uncomfortable around a particular robot.”

“Right now that looks like the Beetlejuice guy, the shrunken head guy. It’s not right.”

An effective robot must be able to perform its task safely and accurately. But the more robots enter social settings like restaurants, hospitals, grocery stores, and care homes, the more it matters what kind of emotional response they spark in the people who encounter them. A robot’s physical actions, in this case, are only one part of its function. If it’s intended to serve or assist humans, but makes them feel alienated or uncomfortable in the process, the robot is not a success.

We are designed to constantly be evaluating the people, animals, and things around us: Is this a threat to me? What is he planning to do? We do the same with robots. Particularly now, in the relatively early days of encountering robots in our daily lives, we don’t instinctively know how to read a robot the way we do a person. Some attempts at directing us are more elegant than others: Jaguar affixed fake eyes to prototype autonomous vehicles it road-tested in England to try to make pedestrians more confident that the vehicles could see them. It succeeded mainly in making the vehicles look bored.

A key task for roboticists is avoiding what McGinn calls “unbalanced design,” where user expectations differ from the machine’s actual ability. This is why even though the presence of a mouth makes a robot seem friendlier, Cakmak would still caution designers against slapping one on, as the presence of a mouth that doesn’t communicate verbally would be confusing to users.

Avoiding unbalanced design is a keystone of ethical robot design. A designer less concerned about ethics could use those same familiar markers to mislead people about their robot’s purposes. Users will automatically turn their gazes toward a friendly, inviting face, something that the designers of robotic photographers and temperature scanners have taken advantage of. It’s one thing if it’s been disclosed to you that a robot will be taking your photograph or biometric information, and something else if not.

Agility intends Digit to be a useful, unobtrusive tool that can take over “dirty, dangerous, and repetitive” work from humans, Hurst said, and with greater efficiency. The company envisions customers using fleets of Digits to achieve a level of productivity that humans can’t achieve, with their bathroom breaks and strained muscles and need for sleep and food. Even if it’s not the stated intention, such a development would almost certainly come at the expense of human jobs.

On a Zoom demonstration of the robot in action, I found myself thinking of dystopian scenarios a lot more than I usually do when a company is showing off their creation. Hurst jostled the robot and it took short quick steps to regain its balance, just like a person would. He gave it a hard shove, and before it hit the floor its arms shot forward to break its fall. As the robot raised itself back to a standing position, I imagined an army of headless robots doing the same thing. Digit is no more dangerous than any other social robot, but I was far more willing to question whether it could be. Because the robot didn’t have any way to signal its intentions, I invented my own.

When the next version of Digit is produced, likely in late 2021, it will have a simple head in rough proportion to the rest of its body and a screen “face” with a pair of eyes reminiscent of Wall-E’s Eve. Its eyes will move in the direction that the robot intends to travel, eliminating the element of uncomfortable surprise. The design will be intentionally simple, and more robot-like than humanoid, so as not to communicate a sense of intelligence or personality that isn’t there. This is a tool, after all. And now that the missing head has been pointed out to Hurst, he gets it.

“Right now that looks like the Beetlejuice guy, the shrunken head guy,” he said. “It’s not right.”

4 years ago in #news by jordany (25)

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The Delicate Art of Making Robots That Don t Creep People Out

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