"When you work with people, you have many, many surprises. You cannot know exactly what the human will do next and many things come up that you didn't expect," says Tapus, associate professor ENSTA-ParisTech, who builds assistive robotics architectures and investigates HRI in therapeutic environments.
Tapus tells of a patient recovering from a stroke who tried to cheat a therapeutic bot during a musical game designed to improve the rehabilitation process. There was no personal gain involved, says Tapus: beyond the satisfaction of outwitting the bot, that is.
"These are things that we couldn't imagine when we designed the system [...] Humans are unpredictable," says Tapus.
For example, young children interacting with the humanoid NAO bot -- a central figure in Tapus' current research -- often instinctively kiss the bot's head, says Tapus. And, if NAO's eyes turn red, the children ask researchers why the bot is upset.
But one elderly woman's relationship with Bandit (a humanoid bot developed by the University of South California's Interaction Lab) provides the most tantalising glimpse into the kind of small, human drama that could be played out hundreds of thousands of times in the future, if robots become more commonplace in our daily lives.
As part of a long-term study of the ways people and bots interact in therapeutic settings, Tapus had Bandit play a musical game with people suffering from dementia. The "Song Discovery" game (loosely based on the television game show "Name That Tune") was specially designed to help dementia patients maintain their attention levels...
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Emmet Cole @'Wired'
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