Researchers have explored robot technology for many years. Now, though, there’s a field of research that surrounds whether robots are legitimate agents with mental and moral capacities and how such perception contributes to human-robot interaction.
“Human-robot interaction work or HRI has been going on in the engineering sciences for a long time and in psych as well, but when it comes to the human communication sciences, it’s relatively new. And over the past 10 years or so there have been a growing number of people largely centered in two academic associations, one is the association of internet researchers and the other is the international communication association. There’s really been this coalescing of people interested in what we are calling human-machine communication, or HMC, that diverges from HRI because it’s less about all of the mechanisms and more about questions of how humans and machines make meaning together, and if they do.”
That’s Texas Tech associate professor Jaime Banks who teaches advertising and brand strategies in the College of Media and Communications. She’s currently analyzing data in the seventh segment of a study that’s being funded by a $730,000 grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Office of Trust and Influence Program.
Robots are already integrated into everyday life. Think vacuum cleaners and refrigerators in homes to factory robots and self-driving cars. However, Banks says expectations and understanding about robots are changing.
“But you know, many of them are starting to go beyond mere functional tools in those capacities, where they are being made to live with us, and to play with us, and to socialize with us in different ways. So I think a lot of the expectations and understandings of what robots are were sort of at a really cool point in time where they’re shifting from what we might perceive as very safe and functional machines to things that cross some boundaries into spaces and activities that we normally think of as human.”
A recent slice of her research involved humans gauging the morality and trustworthiness of her robot, Rae, purchased with her grant funds.
Some of Banks’ scientific approach involves how aware or not we are when we deal with robots when they start to look, act and sound a lot more like us.
“We know a lot about how humans behave with other humans, not everything but we know a good bit. Should we take the things that we know about how human-human interaction unfolds and what its effects are and apply them in human-machine interactions or should we expect that things will be different and then if we take the ladder, then it’s important for us to be open minded in our scientific inquiry and ask that question rather than just make those outright assumptions that is, ‘alright, so when we put a human and a robot in a room together, what is it that actually matters?’”
Her research on robot-human interaction builds on her prior research curiosity. For more than eight years she studied player-avatar relations in videogames.
Then she encountered Valkyrie, a 6-foot, 2-inch, 300-pound semi-autonomous humanoid robot that looks like Ironman, including the glowing circle on its chest.
Valkyrie was built by Johnson Space Center at a cost of $2 million. The robot can use human tools and map its own path safely. Its hydraulic power allows it to navigate well across rocky terrain.
“It’s being built in conjunction with multiple universities to eventually be the doctor on the mission to Mars. It moved me in a way that I couldn’t get rid of this question. Because in that moment I saw this robot as being like me in a particular way, and I wondered whether or how, through different types of interactions, other people might have similar types of experiences or very different experiences. My intuition was that that’s probably really important for how humans and machines will eventually live together, work together and play together.”