A performance with living and mechanical partners can teach researchers how to design more relatable...
The goal is not only to create a memorable performance, but to put into practice what the researchers have learned about building trust between humans and robots.
Although they are becoming more common, trust in them is still low-and this makes humans more reluctant to work with them.
"People may not understand how the robot operates, nor what it wants to accomplish," says Harold Soh, a computer scientist at the National University of Singapore.
Although humans love cute fictional machines like R2-D2 or WALL-E, the best real-world robot for a given task may not have the friendliest looks, or move in the most appealing way.
"Calibrating trust can be difficult when the robot's appearance and behavior are markedly different from humans," Soh says.
They wanted to allow the robots to produce a vast range of sounds, some more complex than others.
As the performers moved in ways intended to convey emotion, Rogel and fellow researchers recorded them with cameras and motion-capture suits, and subsequently generated algorithms so that the robots could match those movements.
"I would ask [Rogel], 'can you make the robots breathe?' And the next week, the arms would be kind of 'inhaling' and 'exhaling,'" says Kennesaw State University dance professor Ivan Pulinkala.
"My approach was to kind of breathe a sense of life into the robots and have the dancers [appear] more 'mechanized,'" Pulinkala says, reflecting on the start of the collaboration.
"I asked, 'How can the robots have more emotional physicality? And how does a dancer then respond to that?'".