Robots have long been a sci-fi favorite, but the robots we traditionally think about have been a failure. Sure, we have robots that can search through debris and do incredibly dangerous or tedious jobs that humans don’t want to do. This is good for humanity, but this is not the general-purpose robot we all think of. The word robot was coined in 1942 (Wikipedia), but what robots do we have in general use today? We have the Roomba… and that’s about it. The attempt to create a robot with sophisticated artificial intelligence has not been successful. We don’t understand enough about human cognition to try and implement it in an artifical being.

Well, there’s been a new push in robotics recently to develop so-called “Social Robots.” They do not take care of us – instead, we interact and take care of them. These robots are not a one-way butler or maid. Instead, we interact with them, and then we develop an affinity for them. They may not be able to go grocery shopping for us, but the can still act on our behalf.

I’ve mentioned how detrimental interruptions are to our workflow before, and researchers are working on metric to determine how engrossed we are with our work – keypresses or mouse clicks/minute, eyetracking, etc. I personally would be disconcerted if my Mac’s built-in camera was watching me to determine if I was busy. However, a little desk trinket that appears to be a cute toy could easily earn a place on my desk and also monitor my keypress rate and even my eye movements. If it were squishy, yellow and adorable (see video below), I’d be more likely to adopt such a monitoring technology. This is all about tapping into some kind of social need. Instead of trying to get robots to mimic our cognition, we use our understanding of the human psyche to build robots that we want to interact with. It’s a fascinating example of understanding how humans function and designing a system around that.

The New York Times has a great article about this new field, which you can read about here. Or, if the link goes away, you can read a PDF here.

So who in the world cares about social robots? They certainly can’t do your laundry, wash your dishes, or walk your dog. But these social robots hit some intrinsic need. Perhaps, a need…. to dance: