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CMU expert: Robots may not be able to feel emotions, but some can show them
Friday, June 29, 2001 By Byron Spice, Science Editor, Post-Gazette
Reid Simmons has created a robot that negotiates campus hallways, and a spacefaring robot that charted its own course to a distant asteroid. He has designed robots to operate autonomously. He has taught robots to work in teams.
But he has never programmed a robot to love. To fake love, maybe, but never to experience emotion.
Love may be unfamiliar territory for roboticists, but it is the theme of Steven Spielberg's movie, "A.I.," which opens in theaters today. In the world imagined by Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick, a child robot named David is built to love a human mother. It's a dramatic hook that allows Spielberg to examine whether humans can love a humanoid, to explore the nature of intelligence and to ponder what separates the real from the artificial.
Those demarcation lines aren't nearly so blurry in today's workaday world of robotics. David's inventor proclaims in the movie that creating an artificial being has been a dream since the beginning of science, but Simmons, 45, a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, says that doesn't ring true.
"Maybe that is harbored in the back of your mind, but that's not what most of the people I know in the field are striving for," said Simmons, who joined the Robotics Institute 13 years ago with a newly minted doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I think most of us look at what we're doing as advancing knowledge. ... We're just trying to develop technology that will benefit people."
Many researchers in robotics and artificial intelligence have been looking forward to this film, given the reputations of Spielberg and Kubrick as leading directors, and their previous examinations of the nature of intelligence, both artificial and extraterrestrial, in movies like "2001" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
After viewing a screening of the movie, Simmons said that "A.I." represents superb storytelling, but that its depiction of artificial intelligence has more to do with fancy than reality.
"'A.I.' is to the field of artificial intelligence what the movie 'E.T.' is to extraterrestrials."
A.I.'s real appearance
Attempts to develop and use artificial intelligence seldom result in robots that anyone would mistake for a human, or even the humanoid robots with arms, legs and head that have been a science fiction favorite for decades.
In Spielberg's hands, Kubrick-inspired 'A.I.' is incongruous but frequently spellbinding
It's just so much easier to add intelligence to an existing machine, such as adding computers and sensors that allow a car to drive itself, than it is to build a complex and expensive humanoid that then must be taught how to drive a car, Simmons explained.
"I think long before we see humanoid robots we'll see aspects of AI and robotics in common household products. We're doing a lot of that now." Already, dishwashers are able to automatically adjust their wash cycles based on how dirty the dishes are, and in Japan, rice cookers are programmed to produce perfect rice. "I think that's where you're going to see the big impact of robotics in the next 15 to 20 years."
To Simmons' eye, the cinematic A.I. world seemed remarkably devoid of robots. "Aside from the [humanoid] robots, there seemed to be almost no robotic technology," he said. People are driving their own cars, collecting their own laundry and doing many of the humdrum chores that roboticists have targeted for automation.
If humanoid technology had advanced sufficiently to create a David, Simmons reasoned, "non-humanoid technology would have permeated society."
Even today, though, there are roboticists who are taking approaches similar to the moviemaker's vision.
In Japan, for instance, there is a national initiative to develop humanoid robots. Several industrial firms, including Honda and Sony, have developed humanoid and animatronic robots that are for sale now or soon will be.
Robots are seen as essential in Japan for coping with a population that is both shrinking and becoming more elderly. That's a similar situation to the future world of "A.I.," where shrinking ice caps have limited land and resources, forcing restrictions on human reproduction that in turn have created a demand for robots to do more work.
A humanoid, said Hirochika Inoue of the University of Tokyo, is ideally suited to take the place of humans and can be adapted to any number of human tasks, from gardening to pushing a wheelchair. Purchasing a personal humanoid, in Inoue's view, eventually will be little different than buying a personal car.
Programming emotions
The movie's most outlandish conceit -- that a robot can feel love -- may be the one that has the most parallels to research under way in today's robotics labs, including Simmons'.
No one is suggesting that any robot today can feel emotions, but researchers trying to improve the interaction of humans and robots are striving mightily to devise robots that can display emotions.
In the movie, David is a prototype for what would amount to an emotional utility. He is designed to fill an emotional void for a man and a woman who are without a child. From the point of view of these owners, it doesn't matter whether David feels love. It may make a difference to the movie audience, but the owners arguably would be satisfied as long as David is able to fake love.
Yet the movie David is so convincing with his displays of love, whether real or artificial, that his adopted mother feels love for him.
Researchers like Simmons aren't trying to get people to love their robots, but to find ways to make it easier for people to use robots. Making robots more human-like is thought to be one way to do that, and imbuing robots with emotion, or what appears to be emotion, is one way to make machines seem human.
Consider Simmons' experience with Xavier, a robot shaped like a 50-gallon drum that he taught to navigate the hallways of CMU's Wean Hall. Xavier used to have problems when people would surround it and make it difficult to move. Xavier never had much luck clearing a path when it broadcast a general request for people to move.
It's more effective if the robot can be assertive, said Sebastian Thrun, a CMU roboticist who is developing nurse robots and robotic museum guides. When faced with a person who didn't respond to polite entreaties to get out of its way, the museum guide robot, which had a mechanical face, would frown at the offending person and repeat the request more loudly.
"People usually left very quickly," Thrun said.
Similarly, the robot found that it could attract people to its tour group most effectively by smiling at them.
So Simmons has begun collaborating with CMU's Drama Department to see if they can program emotions into a new robot he's creating, called Vikia. Like one of the robot characters in "A.I.," an old robot that says it was "Time's Robot of the Year 75 years ago," Vikia has a video, rather than mechanical, face. Her human-like features, capable of expressing an array of emotions, are projected onto a flat-panel display that serves as her head.
A conversational robot
A "social robot," Vikia is intended to interact with humans and to learn the rules of social interaction -- to pass to the right of oncoming people in the hallway, to stand in line, to get on an elevator properly and to have a conversation.
"One of the things we wanted to do was make it engaging enough that people would want to have conversations with it," Simmons said. That meant giving it a back story -- Vikia is the offspring of Xavier and another robot named Amelia and is enrolling as CMU's first robotic student -- and a personality.
Some people have found that personality loud and grating. "If you do what it wants you to do, it can be pleasant," Simmons said. "If you don't do what it wants, it gets less pleasant."
For instance, after Vikia has talked with a person and is ready to move on, she will tell the person, "That's it, you can go now." But if the person hangs around, Vikia lets it be known that she is irritated and tells the offender to "go away."
Simmons' hopes to have Vikia ready to enroll as a student this fall proved overly optimistic. It's difficult to give a machine the depth of knowledge and experience that's necessary to make it socially engaging, he said, so it will take longer to develop Vikia's software.
"You wouldn't expect your microwave to apologize for burning your food. But once people see the robot as a social being, they expect more of it."
In "A.I.," David initially unnerves his adopted mother, following her around, watching her every move. But, in much the same way as repetition has allowed CMU's robots to learn how to drive, or to distinguish a meteorite from a common rock, David eventually learns how to interact with his mother.
One episode that ultimately leads to David's acceptance by his human parents, Simmons noted, is when the robot boy laughs at his mother as she eats spaghetti. It's similar to Robin Williams' 1999 movie, "Bicentennial Man," in which a robot's ability to make jokes helps a family recognize that it's more than just a machine.
"Humor is an incredibly difficult intellectual capability," Simmons said. "When we can get an AI system than can exhibit a sense of humor, we'll be pretty far along."
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