[Tyler]

Change the World by Walking with Robots
     


The University of the West of England said in a news
release that Professor Alan Winfield of UWE has
been awarded a
prestigious Media Fellowship to further his research and public
relations work. Winfield leads the Walking with Robots project
which works in the lab and in public to entertain and education children
about robots while gathering information about the children's
understanding and expectation of robots. In the video above, children
learn how robot hands work by building one of their own. Why all this
concern about how kids view robots? Winfield writes:
“Some fictional views of the future paint a very bleak
picture of what could happen with intelligent robots, but equally robots
could change the world for the better. The point is that we have a
choice. The future is too important to be allowed to just happen –
instead we and our children must own it.”

Winfield is
also doing research on the origin of culture among humans and is
performing experiments with artificial societies of robots to see if
cultures and traditions evolve naturally. For more, see Walking with
Robot's 2008 report on Young
People's Views on Advanced Robotics (PDF format).

   

http://robots.net/article/2898.html