[Wim Delvoye / Cloaca - MuHKA, Antwerp 2000 / 2000] ADB extends these incursions into a different sphere of life. It has been created to share intimacy with a person. Intimacy in this light is treated as a domain permeable to computation. The approach taken is to limit the interactions to non-linguistic, physical exchanges. Through programmed movements and responses which gently stimulate the body, ADB arouses its human interactors not primarily at the high level of semantic thought, but at the low level of "body schema" as articulated by Merleau-Ponty.
[Sociable Machines Lab / Kismet / photo: carolclarinet] The approach differentiates itself from other related efforts. Cynthia Breazeal, Hiroshi Ishiguro and much of the human-robot interaction community use bio-mimicry in robots to elicit the participant's emotions. The machines have eyebrows and lips though no flesh to warrant these features. ADB by contrast is non-representational. Its visual features have been reduced to a single monotoned geometry. It is composed of a linear series of prismatic modules, each containing a motor, several sensors, and accompanying electronics. A module's sensors include an encoder to learn the position of the motor, a current sensor to know the force that the motor is exerting, and touch sensors for detecting skin contact.
[ADB (after Deep Blue)] The geometry was selected, as were the technologies, for the behaviors they enable, the rubbing, squirming and wrapping which draw the robot closer to a person's body. It is a significant difference, because the effort is to create a genuine intimacy between human and machine. By moving away from the masking symbolism of mimesis and towards a form that embraces its artificiality, the machine is acknowledged as a distinct entity and intimacy becomes possible. In this sense ADB is much more in line with some contemporary body-centric sex toys with which representations of anatomy are eschewed for ergonomic design. This is not to say that ADB does not look like existent creatures. Viewers quite naturally call it "the snake". The point is its form follows its function.
[Ergonomic Design] Like the physical shape, the software that guides ADB avoids mimetic representation which is often manifested in humanoid robots according to theory of mind as derived from psychology. Rather, in ADB behaviors are treated as emergent phenomena from the the interaction of simple components. The modules are individually programmed as cells in a cellular automata. Each determines its movements based on stimulation to its shell, and the input of its direct neighbors. From this decentralized program emerges system-wide behaviors that are disposed towards specific relationships with participants. For example, each module is alerted when one of its neighbors is touched, which triggers it to turn until it too makes skin contact, which then triggers its neighbor to follow suit, and so on until the entire robot is wrapped around an appendage. This behavior is experienced as intimacy because it is responsive, reinforcing the participant's sense of agency; it is affective, stimulating tactile senses which arouse emotion; and it attracts the robot to the viewer. This behavior-based approach is (non-exclusively) in keeping with the spirit of the Turing test, which posits that the assessment of a machine's sentience should be based on our experience of it as such. |
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