When people communicate with each other, their movements express as much as the words that come out of their mouths. But what happens when those who try to communicate with us are robots? Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have shown that when robots move in a similar way to humans, the interaction between the two is much more natural . The results of the research have been presented at the Conference on Human-Robot Interaction held these days in Lausanne (Switzerland).
? Normally robots move by ‘jumping’, with continuous stops and starts, while humans move much more fluidly ?, explains Michael Gielniak, who has developed the work together with Andrea Thomaz. “We want humans to interact with robots as they would with another human, so that the contact is more intuitive.”
To this end, Thomaz and Gielniak have programmed the Simon robot to perform movements without cuts and in such a way that several joints can move at the same time. The result is a continuous movement, with gestures that it is very easy for any spectator to recognize what is observing what the automaton is doing. The next step will be to program the algorithm that moves the robot in such a way that to perform the same task it can perform the movements in several different ways, until finally, ” let’s forget that what we have in front of us is a robot ” predicts Gielniak.
