Social Robots
November 14, 2021
What is a social robot?
Social robots are autonomous devices designed to interact with people and exhibit social behaviors. There are plenty of examples of social robots in pop culture, like Wall E, the transformers, and any of the droids in Star Wars. However, they’ve started popping up in the real world in different settings. Researchers have explored how social robots can contribute to daily life in areas like healthcare, home care, and education. There are so many cool applications of social robots, but something that underlies them all is trust. How can you design social robots to be trustworthy?
Social robots are autonomous devices designed to interact with people and exhibit social behaviors. There are plenty of examples of social robots in pop culture, like Wall E, the transformers, and any of the droids in Star Wars. However, they’ve started popping up in the real world in different settings. Researchers have explored how social robots can contribute to daily life in areas like healthcare, home care, and education. There are so many cool applications of social robots, but something that underlies them all is trust. How can you design social robots to be trustworthy?
Trust
One way trust comes into play is visually via the uncanny valley. If robots are made to look too humanlike, people are turned off and lose trust in the robot. You can see an example here of a robot that was made to look like a human but isn’t quite right. One way designers have gotten away from the uncanny valley is by intentionally designing robots to look cartoonish. These robots have huge eyes and look like something out of a cartoon movie. These are made to mimic babies faces and are supposed to be more trustworthy for humans. Figure 2 shows an example of a robot named Pepper with big cartoon eyes. People see a robot that looks inherently cute and they want to help it. If it looks cute and helpless, how could it be something bad?
Figure 1. Humanlike social robot that falls into the uncanny valley.
Trust also comes into play with the social robot’s behavior, not just its looks. According to the Washington Post, majority of social robots on the market are “single purpose machines.” They are only meant to do one thing: mow the lawn, make coffee, or act like a pet to be taken care of. It’s easier to design a social robot that does one thing really well, but it’s not practical moving forward to have one robot in your house that only does one thing. It’s a lot more practical to have one robot in your house that can do all the household tasks, like wash and put away dishes, do laundry, mow the lawn, broom, vacuum the house, etc. Trust comes into play because if the robot doesn’t complete the task as the human expects, it has broken that trust. Engineers need to keep this in mind when designing social robots so that humans either manage expectations regarding how well they function or so that social robots can fulfill their duties and build trust.
Figure 2. Pepper, a social robot made with cartoonish looking eyes.
What do you think about social robots? Are you excited to start seeing them in the real world or do you think they're creepy? I'd love to hear your thoughts!