Safety issues loom as humanoid invasion approaches – tech – 10 March 2010 – New Scientist.
More and more people are asking the question ‘how can we make it safe to hang out with robots in our daily life?’
In the New Scientist article, Chris Melhuish looks at how facial expressions of a humanoid can be used to make the humanoids intentions more transparent to human users, so that we would know what to expect from the robot.

A new study from Carnegie Mellon University by Jodi Forlizzi “How Robotic Products Become Social Products: An Ethnographic Study of Robotic Products in the Home” states that “when simple social attributes are part of the design of robotic products and systems, people may adopt them more readily and find them less stigmatizing”.
In this study, six different families were given either a stick vacuum cleaner or a Roomba, and an ethnographic study was conducted.
For media coverage on the literature please visit NewScientist.com

In response to the recent ‘A Perfect (Robotic) Woman‘ post, my good friend Mike sent me a couple of related articles that poses more questions/concerns regarding the robotic girlfriend/wife/companion issue.
The first article tells more than just stories of Nisan and Nemutan (a stuffed pillowcase with 2D female character printed on it) in Japan. One of the most interesting quotes from the article for me was “If, as some researchers suggest, romantic love can be broken down into electrical impulses in the brain, then why not train the mind to simulate those …

Another newly discovered journal!

There are three special issues from this journal that might be of interest to you: 1.Psychological Benchmarks of Human-Robot Interaction(2007), 2. Human and Robot Interactive Communication(2008), 3. Robots in the Wile: Exploring human-robot interaction in naturalistic environments(2009)

Some interesting titles from the journal: “What is a Human? Toward psychological benchmarks in the field of human–robot interaction”, “Nonverbal intimacy as a benchmark for human–robot interaction”, and “The influence of robot personality on perceived and preferred level of user control”

Authors: Andrea Bauer · Klaas Klasing · Georgios Lidoris · Quirin Mühlbauer ·Florian Rohrmüller · Stefan Sosnowski · Tingting Xu ·Kolja Kühnlenz ·DirkWollherr · Martin Buss
International Journal of Social Robotics
Link: SpringerLink.
Abstract
The Autonomous City Explorer (ACE) project combines research from autonomous outdoor navigation and human-robot interaction. The ACE robot is capable of navigating unknown urban environments without the use of GPS data or prior map knowledge. It finds its way by interacting with pedestrians in a natural and intuitive way and building …

Study on how uncanny valley is not unique to humans.

‘Robots That Care’ is an interesting summary piece from New Yorker that came out early this week.
It gives a summary of what studies have been done, and are being done in the field of therapy robots.
Dr. Mataric (University of Southern California), who has been studying the human-robot interaction side of therapy robots, is the main scientist introduced in the article. Some of her studies introduced in the article include the effect of robot’s personality in motivating stroke patients, and effectiveness of human-robot versus human-computer interaction with Alzheimer’s patients.
CosmoBot, a Wizard …