Spent the past few days manning my project work booth at the recent Spinnovex 2008 (Singapore Polytechnic’s project fair). Manning a booth at an exhibition, especially one that is not going to earn you any money, provides one with a good opportunity to observe the behaviour of people while being somewhat detached from the situation.
I observed a robot from the opposite exhibit. It was programmed to seek and approach nearby people while holding a tray with flyers and sweets on it and offer them the items on the tray. This particular robot was a simple little machine with sensors, wheels and a male mannequin’s torso mounted on it, dressed up in a shirt, vest, bandanna, cowboy hat and dark glasses.
For three days, I watched this robot wandering around, rather “enthusiastically” offering visitors (and occasionally us) the items on its tray. What was most interesting were people’s reactions to it.
Some laughed critically at the failure of its technology when it became confused and spun in circles (fortunately not very often)
Some (adults and teenagers) expressed fear, walking gingerly around the robot, touching it quickly and running away.
Many people, upon being shocked by it initially when it accidentally bumped into them, realised it was a robot and smiled kindly at it, not unlike the way one would smile at a little child or little animal.
A number of visitors, especially male, showed keen interest in the machinery and peered at the wheels under the robot, or stood at a safe distance to observe it.
A number of people took advantage of its passivity by doing things that they would not usually dare to do to a human being. For example, a Malay girl called it “handsome” in a loud voice, then went off giggling with her friends. Quite a large number of people expressed aggressive feelings towards the robot, pretending to slap it, patting it on the face in a condescending manner, etc. A group of young students surrounded the robot to prevent it from moving. Another group removed its hat but promptly replaced it afterwards.
Others treated the robot as merely a surface, placing trash and other such items on it. However, there were only a few of these occurrences.
An interesting observation was that after reading the flyers, visitors would tend to place the flyers back into the tray held by the robot rather than discarding it.
A mix of reactions that one would give to a living animal combined with those that one would give an inanimate object.
Humanoid robots are a unique piece of machinery.
I doubt that this robot would have provoked such a unique response if it hadn’t been in the form of a human.
SATan's kingdom 