News: Innovation: Teaching robots some manners

13:07 17 May 2010 by Colin Barras

Where PCs are concerned, faster is invariably better. But things aren't so clear-cut in human society. The next generation of social robots will be better loved if they adopt more human-like behaviour – even if that means losing some of their raw efficiency.

Norihiro Hagita and colleagues at the ATR laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, asked 38 volunteers to click on a PC mouse to enlarge an image. The response was programmed to be delayed by 1 to 3 seconds. As expected, an immediate response was most favoured, and participants expressed more and more dissatisfaction as the delay lengthened.

But a version of the experiment that involved a humanoid robot threw up a surprising result. The volunteers were asked to tell the robot to take out the rubbish, and the robot verbally acknowledged the request. This time an immediate response – beginning the moment the volunteer finished talking – was considered less welcome than one that was delayed by a second.

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