SoylentNews

upstart writes:

Simple robots wander NYC asking for trash and recycling, and it's adorable:

My favorite approach to human-robot interaction is minimalism. I've met a lot of robots, and some of the ones that have most effectively captured my heart are those that express themselves through their fundamental simplicity and purity of purpose. What's great about simple, purpose-driven robots is that they encourage humans to project needs and wants and personality onto them, letting us do a lot of the human-robot-interaction (HRI) heavy lifting.

In terms of simple, purpose-driven robots, you can't do much better than a robotic trash barrel (or bin or can or what have you). And in a paper presented at HRI 2023 this week, researchers from Cornell explored what happened when random strangers interacted with a pair of autonomous trash barrels in NYC, with intermittently delightful results.

What's especially cool about this, is how much HRI takes place around these robots that have essentially no explicit HRI features, since they're literally just trash barrels on wheels. They don't even have googly eyes! However, as the video notes, they're controlled remotely by humans, so a lot of the movement-based expression they demonstrate likely comes from a human source—whether or not that's intentional. [...]

[...] Another interesting thing going on here is how people expect that the robots want to be "fed" trash and recycling:

Occasionally, people thought the robots expected trash from them and felt obligated to give the robots something. As the robot passed and stopped by the same person for the second time, she said: "I guess it knows I've been sitting here long enough, I should give it something." Some people would even find an excuse to generate trash to "satisfy" and dismiss the trash barrel by searching through a bag or picking rubbish up off the floor.

[...] I wonder how much of this social interaction is dependent on the novelty of meeting the trash barrel robots for the first time, and whether (if these robots were to become full-time staff) humans would start treating them more like janitors. I'm also not sure how well these robots would do if they were autonomous. If part of the magic comes from having a human in the loop to manage what seems like (but probably aren't) relatively simple human-robot interactions, turning that into effective autonomy could be a real challenge.

Video of the trash robot experiment

Original Submission