Communications of the ACM
Building Human-Robot Relationships Through Music and Dance
According to the researchers, the FOREST robots and accompanying musical robots are not rigid mimickers of human melody and movement; rather, they exhibit a remarkable level of emotional expression and human-like gesture fluencywhat the researchers call
Credit: IEEE Spectrum
There's no reliably good way of getting a human to trust a robot. Part of the problem is that robots, generally, just do whatever they've been programmed to do, and for a human, there's typically no feeling that the robot is in the slightest bit interested in making any sort of non-functional connection. From a robot's perspective, humans are fragile ambulatory meatsacks that are not supposed to be touched and who help with tasks when necessary, nothing more.
Humans come to trust other humans by forming an emotional connection with them, something that robots are notoriously bad at. An emotional connection obviously doesn't have to mean love, or even like, but it does mean that there's some level of mutual understanding and communication and predictability, a sense that the other doesn't just see you as an object (and vice versa). For robots, which are objects, this is a real challenge, and with funding from the National Science Foundation, roboticists from the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology have partnered with the Kennesaw State University dance department on a "forest" of improvising robot musicians and dancers who interact with humans to explore creative collaboration and the establishment of human-robot trust.
From IEEE Spectrum
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