[Tyler]

Tweenbots: Little Lost Robots Who Need Your Help
     

 
Artist Kacie Kinzer of the Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program
wanted to find out if typical New York pedestrians would help a little lost
robot. So she built some little robots designed to need human
intervention to reach their goal. She called these little robots
Tweenbots. A Tweenbot, while
autonomous, can travel only in a straight
line. It has a small flag that displays its intended destination.
Would people help it, ignore it, or worse?
The results were unexpected. Over the course of the
following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were
successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away
destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught
under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in
a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its
goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would
ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if
that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One
man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come,
saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the
road.”

In some cases, the robot's goal was quite far away, such as getting
from the northeast corner Washington State Park to the southwest corner,
a trip which took the robot 42 minutes and the intervention of 29 people
to complete. The artist suggests this result tells us about people's
"willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human
characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention
without the means of achieving its goal alone". Kacie is working on new Tweenbots with new
missions in the coming weeks. Props to LowImagination for
bringing this story to our attention and for noting that while the
Tweenbot seems simple it may have worthwhile implications for those
studying human robot interaction.
   

http://robots.net/article/2806.html
     

[Art]

Pretty cool article.

I wonder whether people would be so willing to assist if it were not so small and cute?

[Freddy]

Yeah good article, I was surprised no one pinched one.