I keep on wondering why robotics researchers persist in designing humanoid robots specifically for domestic applications… Quite often, it seems to because they figure if the robot looks like a person, then it’ll be easier for people to relate to it and become comfortable having it in their home. Such figuring isn’t quite right, and in fact may be entirely wrong, at least according to this 2008 study from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and EPFL\. Researchers surveyed 240 people at a home and living exhibition in Geneva about their feelings on robots in their lives, and came up with some interesting data, including the above graph which shows pretty explicitly that having domestic robots that look like humans (or even “creatures”) is not a good idea, and is liable to make people uncomfortable. The location for the survey was chosen because the people attending the exhibition weren’t interested in robots specifically, but rather home technology in general, making them potential early adopters for robots in the home. And since they decided that going to a home and living exhibition was a fun way to spend their time, it’s probably safe to assume that they’d spent some time thinking about what they would and wouldn’t like to get out of a robot. After the jump, more data on what respondents see robots doing for them in the near future. The researchers point out that tasks involving relationships score far lower than general manual labor replacement, suggesting that people aren’t interested (at this point) in dealing with a robot on any deeper level than as a tool (although that may change with use). Personally, I was rather disappointed to see driving get such a negative response. It makes sense, I suppose, since also getting negative responses were other tasks in […]

Batteries are terribly inconvenient. The more power or endurance you need, the bulkier and heavier the battery has to be, and the more time it takes to recharge. Really, it’s the recharging that’s the problem, since until we develop a feasible ultracapacitor, any battery powered robot is going to have to spend a significant amount of time doing nothing but sitting around recharging its batteries. One way to get around this is to charge backup batteries external to the robot itself, but that process has generally been more trouble than it’s worth, since batteries tend to be heavily integrated into the structures of robots. Way back in September of 2009, we posted about a conceptual pet care robot that used an external battery swapping method, which was very cool, but it didn’t look like it had a prayer of ever being realized. The video above shows an actual external battery swapping system in action, on a marXbot, which is part of the Swarmanoid project from EPFL. Using a rotary loader, marXbot can swap out its battery in seconds while a capacitor keeps the robot powered. The batteries charge on the loader, so by the time the spent battery makes it all the way around, it’s been recharged and is ready for another robot in need of a fresh meal. Somewhat ironically, swarms of robots are arguably least dependent on power system restraints, the idea being that you can just have other robots in the swarm cycle in and out to charge. However, the more robots you have, the more charging infrastructure you need. With this battery swapping system, the number of robots that can recharge at once is limited only by the number of batteries in the system, as opposed to the number of charging stations or outlets or something, […]

Mad props to Erico Guizzo from IEEE Spectrum for coming up with this robot baby matrix, which is pretty self explanatory (right?). Robot baby matrix… That’s my official phrase of the day. Click to embiggen. Robots include: Nao M3-Neony Nexi Simon iCub CB2 Diego-San Zeno Yotaro Kojiro Robotinho Repliee R1 RealCare Baby [ IEEE Spectrum ]