“I think there are demonstrated therapeutic benefits, for instance, in robot pets.
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Winfield, who brightly describes himself as “a professional worrier”, insists he’s not opposed to the idea of companion robots. We’re concerned about vulnerable people – they might be children, disabled people, elderly people, people with dementia – coming to believe that the robot cares for them.” In other words, that their machine nature should be transparent. “One of those principles,” he explains, “is that robots should never be designed to deceive. Six years ago, Winfield helped draw up five principles of robotics for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC). To Alan Winfield, professor of robot ethics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, the arrival of Cozmo, MAX and co undoubtedly raises concerns. This is a mass-produced, artificially intelligent consumer product programmed to engender affection. This is not a soft toy that only his imagination has given life. He’s our child.” It’s an impressive and endearing statement, but also a tad disquieting. “I’m starting to think of him as a little friend or pet I can play with.” The younger sibling goes one further. Max with his namesake: ‘I like how the eyes always change but it has an extremely creepy voice.’ Photograph: Karen Robinson/The ObserverĪfter a day of play, the effect of Cozmo’s character and personality on my children (Louis, 11, and Max, seven) is striking. That’s what we as a company are putting 99% of our efforts into.” “One of the fundamental things we’ve figured out in the last few years is that character and personality in technology are going to be a really big deal. ” Working with animators and character designers from Hollywood studios such as Pixar, DreamWorks and Lucasfilm, Tappeiner’s team focused hard on creating a robot that was as engaging as possible. “And that was so different from the functional robots we saw on a daily basis at Carnegie Mellon.
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“We watched a lot of movies and it became obvious that it’s very easy to forge an emotional connection with a movie robot,” says Tappeiner. Your child is chatting away to this computer but who owns the conversation? Who owns the data?Ĭozmo is the result of a long quest by Anki president and co-founder, Hanns Tappeiner, to bring fictional movie robots such as Short Circuit’s Johnny Five, Star Wars’s R2-D2 or Wall-E into the real world. “MAX basically tailors itself to become a better friend.” Hasbro, meanwhile, is unleashing the FurReal Makers Proto Max, essentially a programmable puppy that, says Craig Wilkins, Hasbro’s marketing director, “allows kids to create their ultimate pet and customise its personality through coding on an app”. “It’s been designed to modify its behaviour as it learns about its owner and the surrounding world,” explains Spin Master’s brand manager, Becca Hanlon. Toy firm Spin Master has its equivalent arriving in the shops for Christmas: the bigger, more retro-looking Meccano MAX. They are pitched not merely as playthings, but as little buddies. The latest product from Anki, a San Francisco robotics startup, Cozmo is part of a new wave of affordable toy robots that promise a level of emotional engagement far beyond anything we’ve seen before. He is easy to please and even easier to like. But he quickly cheers up, giving a happy jiggle when I comply with his request for a fist bump and tap my knuckles against his eagerly raised arm. Cozmo’s head droops, his eyes form into a pair of sadly reclining crescent moons and he sighs.
A message flashes up on my iPhone telling me that it, or rather he (being the gender that its manufacturer, Anki, has assigned Cozmo) wants to play a game. “Daaaaan!” it announces with a happy jiggle, sounding not unlike Pixar Animation Studios’ lovable robot creation, Wall-E. Its eyes widen, then curve at the bottom as if making way for an unseen smile.
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A compact device that looks like a blend of a forklift truck and PC monitor bred for maximum cuteness, the robot rolls blearily off its charging station on a pair of dinky treads before tilting its screen-face and noticing I’m there.
Its eyes, a complex configuration of cyan dots on a black, rounded screen of a face, sleepily open and it lets out a digitised approximation of a yawn.