Here's something that I've observed myself.
Japanese researchers programmed a robot to move through a crowded shopping mall, then watched to see how people responded to it. If the robot's path was obstructed, it asked politely in Japanese. "May I please pass?"
When the robot encountered adults, the humans politely moved aside and allowed the robot to roll through, as if it was human.
But unsupervised children were entirely different, especially when they were in groups.
They would tell the robot "No!" and intentionally step into its path. When the robot turned away from the child in its path and tried to go in another direction, other kids in the group would block the new path, shouting 'No!".
Then they started insulting the robot, calling it stupid, and eventually started hitting and bashing it.
(It probably shouldn't be surprising to anyone who is familiar with children, they can be sadistic little monsters before they are socialized. But it's still definitely one for the child psychologists.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...g-up-robot
http://www.rikou.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/d...15LBR2.pdf
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...o-a-closet
I saw kids behaving the same way at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto which was host to a robot technology demonstration last year. Kids would block the robots' path to make them stop, would push on the robots to confuse them, and just tormented the crap out of the poor mechanical things.
The engineers in Japan decided that the best way to program a robot to move through a crowd of humans was for it to avoid groups of humans shorter than four feet tall and if confronted by the little devils, to seek out the protection of taller humans.
Japanese researchers programmed a robot to move through a crowded shopping mall, then watched to see how people responded to it. If the robot's path was obstructed, it asked politely in Japanese. "May I please pass?"
When the robot encountered adults, the humans politely moved aside and allowed the robot to roll through, as if it was human.
But unsupervised children were entirely different, especially when they were in groups.
They would tell the robot "No!" and intentionally step into its path. When the robot turned away from the child in its path and tried to go in another direction, other kids in the group would block the new path, shouting 'No!".
Then they started insulting the robot, calling it stupid, and eventually started hitting and bashing it.
(It probably shouldn't be surprising to anyone who is familiar with children, they can be sadistic little monsters before they are socialized. But it's still definitely one for the child psychologists.)
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...g-up-robot
http://www.rikou.ryukoku.ac.jp/~nomura/d...15LBR2.pdf
http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robot...o-a-closet
I saw kids behaving the same way at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto which was host to a robot technology demonstration last year. Kids would block the robots' path to make them stop, would push on the robots to confuse them, and just tormented the crap out of the poor mechanical things.
The engineers in Japan decided that the best way to program a robot to move through a crowd of humans was for it to avoid groups of humans shorter than four feet tall and if confronted by the little devils, to seek out the protection of taller humans.