The robots Osaka university has built have all been along a variety of different themes, leading to a lot of new robots being built to test new hypotheses. Cognitive Neuroscience Robotics has, as its goal, the development of information and robot technology systems that are human-friendly, and so, working from the notion that the human brain is essentially for human communication, the first thing we did was to build an android, a robot highly resembling a human. We learned a lot through this, but after that we were confronted by a question raised by producing a human-like robot: What, exactly, is so human-like about humans? How does one explain what defines one’s own human-ness? It’s quite a difficult question.
In the end, it becomes clear that this question of “human-ness” is something that simply can’t be explained in words. It was as we built robots that we noticed that no matter how perfectly an android resembles a person, if your mind recognizes it as “not human,” no matter what you do, it clearly isn’t human to you, but on the other hand if your first impression is “that’s a human,” then it will always be human to you. This is the essential nature of human communication.
Osaka university realized that there are two approaches: you can either work on designs that will draw on the abstract idea in our heads of “this is what is ‘human’,” or you can deliberately avoid drawing on this mental model while still incorporating unquestionably “human” elements.
Bearing this in mind, they produced the Telenoid as a sort of “minimalist human” design, meant to be unquestionably human-looking while simultaneously lacking any particularly specific traits or features. Hearing a voice come from it makes it seem strangely human.
Psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science have long been regarded as the most direct route to understand humans; building robots, however, offers us another path to do so. If, for example, we were to take the question of “what defines ‘human-ness’?” there are things that psychology and cognitive science simply can’t possibly explain, whereas if we were to simply approach the question by building and operating a robot, this question can become easier to answer.
For more details visit : http://www.cnr.osaka-u.ac.jp/?page_id=953&lang=en
Comments are closed.