Robots are increasingly being used in business and industrial applications, from agricultural robots that can help farmers take the guesswork out of decision-making, to a functional robot that is powered by a vacuum.
But the use of robots in a social context in our everyday lives, such as in the education and healthcare sectors, is less common in Australia.
New research by Nicole Robinson (pictured here), a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology, could change that.
Robinson’s research is aiming to evaluate human-robot interactions and how people relate to robots and whether they form connections with them. She is also aiming to develop a psychometric scale and determine if people feel comfortable enough to bond with a social robot.
This scale could then be used by professionals in areas such as health care and education to find out how people might react to robots in their workplace.
Improving lifestyles
Robots can be adept at carrying out repetitive tasks, which in a health care or education setting, could mean repeatedly giving the same information to patients or students if they want to know about a certain topic.
Carrying out small tasks like this could help to alleviate some of the workload of health professionals and teachers so they could spend more time on complex work.
“If a robot could do something such as run through an exercise in a school or another kind of routine task, that could help to support professionals so they could focus on more intensive aspects of their work,” she said.
Robinson is also carrying out research using the SoftBank robot NAO to find out if social robots could encourage people to have better eating habits.
As part of the research, she is conducting trials that involve NAO talking to people and helping them come up with a program to reduce their consumption of high-sugar, high-fat foods.
Part of the study also involved seeing if people were comfortable working face-to-face with a robot on a goal to improve their health.
Comfort levels
Robinson said while it is known that the general public has different opinions about robots, research needs to be carried out to determine how comfortable people actually feel around robots and the idea of interacting with one.
For example, are they looking forward to having them in their everyday lives, or are they uncertain about what robots might mean for them.
As social robots are relatively new in Australia, the levels of comfort of someone in Australia can differ from someone in Japan, where social robots are used more often.
One example is the use of Japanese company SoftBank’s Pepper robot, which was launched in 2014 and can recognise principal human emotions and adapt its behaviour to the mood of who it is communicating with.
While Pepper is a common sight in Japan and used in various applications, from handing out tickets in a sushi restaurant to helping man stores, the robot is still just emerging in Australia.
“Japan has had a lot more exposure to robotics in their society than we have in Australia, particularly with social robots, which are designed to talk and interact with people,” Robinson said.
“Other countries are currently using social robots more than Australia.”
Robinson said it is still unknown what approach would work the best in Australia to introduce robots into everyday life here, and whether gradual exposure paired with education in robotics could help.
She said having more knowledge about how they work and how to interact with them might also be helpful.
But Robinson cautioned that care needs to be taken when introducing robots into society, and care should be taken to ensure that it’s done in a way that people find comfortable and acceptable.
“We need to be cautious about pushing social robots into areas too fast and too soon where it’s not considered appropriate or helpful. We need to make sure that when we are using social robots, it’s in a way that people aren’t feeling threatened or upset about it,” she said.
“As part of this research, we do also want to find out whether it is okay to use social robots in this area, and if not, we need to respect the results of this research and find other ways that we can help to support people with technology.”