The MIT Media Lab’s Personal Robots
Group flanks the soaring Tatrium on the fourth floor of the Wiesner
Building, a wall of metal panels along the southern edge of Cambridge,
Mass.
The space looks like the set of an ill-advised
Terminator-meets-the-Muppets crossover. Mechanical arms, grippers and
eyeballs clutter workbenches alongside colorful anemones, fairies and
teddy bears, machines that defy sci-fi conventions demanding robots look
like rolling trashcans or hard-shelled humans.
Another stereotype buster, named Jibo, sits on the edge of the
desk in researcher Cynthia Breazeal’s cramped office. It’s 11 inches,
six pounds and stationary, and resembles nothing so much as a desk lamp.
But Breazeal believes it could be the first machine to fulfill the
potential of personal robotics, offering average consumers a friendly,
affordable helper.
It speaks in a childlike voice, swivels its screen in the manner of a
puppy’s head tilt, and winks with a cartoonish eye. It can read to
children, snap pictures, flag upcoming appointments, facilitate video
chats and order up Chinese delivery.
In many ways, Jibo represents the culmination of decades of research
for Breazeal, who pioneered the field of social robotics in the late
1990s.
Working at the cross section of psychology, computer science and
engineering, she developed a series of machines that could interact with
people in more natural ways, conveying and responding to emotional
cues. Breazeal believed that in order for robots to assist humans in
everyday settings like homes, hospitals or schools, they first had to
behave in ways that put us at ease.
It was an ambitious undertaking, so much so that nearly two decades
later, robots still rarely reach the front door, save for a few vacuums
and toys. But today, Breazeal and her group are moving machines into the
real world that can function as personal assistants, teachers’ aides
and caretakers for the sick and elderly.
Given failing public schools, soaring chronic-disease rates and an
aging population, she believes that humans are simply going to need more
help from machines of this sort.
“I’m looking at these huge societal challenges coming our way,”
Breazeal said. “We need technology to do better for us in all these
ways.”
But for all the promise of social robots, they’ll arrive in our
lives weighed down with considerable baggage, carrying along a host of
tricky questions about privacy, security, jobs, digital manipulation and
the appropriate boundaries between humans and machines.
Brazeal, 47, mostly grew up in
Livermore, Calif., where San Francisco’s suburbs give way to the rural
Central Valley. She was the youngest child of two mathematicians: A
mother who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a father
at Sandia National Laboratories.
In 1977, when she was 10, the family drove to a local movie theater to see “Star Wars.”
“It was jaw-dropping, and I was in awe of the starships flying
overhead,” she said. “And then these amazing robots came on and I, like
so many people around the world, just fell in love with those droids.”
“They weren’t only super-cool and capable, but they were friends of
the people,” she said. “They had emotions, they cared, they were loyal,
they were full-fledged characters. I think that that forever changed my
ideas of what robots could be and should be.”
She earned degrees in electrical and computer engineering at UC Santa
Barbara, a sprawling campus along the Southern California coastline,
then headed east to pursue her graduate and doctoral studies at MIT.
credit: recode.net
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