Even Trash Can Robots Need Social Skills

Credit: Stanford University Pity the trash can robot. When it tried to offer its services as a waste receptacle in a Stanford University cafeteria, some people pointedly ignored the robot despite its attempts to get their attention. One person even gave the trash robot a kick to move it along. Unlike the protocol droid C-3PO from "Star Wars," the trash can robot took its abuse in good stride rather than blurting out "How rude!" The trash robot represented part of a Stanford University experiment designed to test how people interact with robots in a more natural setting outside the lab. Such information could prove valuable as human designers try to create more sophisticated robots capable of reading human social signals. A kick from a person represents an obvious social signal to "go away." But Stanford researchers, working with a colleague from the University of Southern Denmark, found that the majority of people who didn't want the robot's services showed their lack of interest by choosing to avoid social interaction with the robot entirely. "We are particularly interested in how people will behave when they encounter robots "in the wild" as they go about their daily activities; what they do to signal or interact with the robot, and how they make sense of the interaction," said Wendy Ju, executive director of Interaction Design Research at Stanford University and a coauthor of the paper. That means robots of the future may need the artificial intelligence to interpret social signals — or the lack of such signals — in order to interact well with people. The experiment was detailed in a paper published online from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2015 Spring Symposia.