The Delicate Art of Making Robots That Don’t Creep People Out
By: Corinne Purtill
Tags: Robotics, Culture, Technology, Automation, Robots

The absence of a head didn’t initially bother Digit’s creators. The Agility team was more focused on the challenge of perfecting the machine’s bipedal locomotion — in other words, making it walk really well.

Their efforts paid off. Digit’s steady and agile gait is an engineering triumph. “It’s by far my favorite of the bipedal robots,” McGinn said. Yet even a robot’s walk can trigger emotions in observers. Agility is planning tweaks to the next revision that will change the “clank clank” sound of the robot’s gait, which sounded to some early users like an angry stomp. But it still has to make some sound, or it could be perceived as sneaky. Digit will be working alongside people, and a good co-worker doesn’t sneak up on you or stomp around menacingly.

“One general theme is that if a robot surprises somebody, it makes them pretty uncomfortable,” Hurst said. “But that’s also true for another person. If someone’s behavior surprises you or is unpredictable, it’s the same mechanism, I think, that makes people uncomfortable around a particular robot.”

“Right now that looks like the Beetlejuice guy, the shrunken head guy. It’s not right.”

An effective robot must be able to perform its task safely and accurately. But the more robots enter social settings like restaurants, hospitals, grocery stores, and care homes, the more it matters what kind of emotional response they spark in the people who encounter them. A robot’s physical actions, in this case, are only one part of its function. If it’s intended to serve or assist humans, but makes them feel alienated or uncomfortable in the process, the robot is not a success.

We are designed to constantly be evaluating the people, animals, and things around us: Is this a threat to me? What is he planning to do? We do the same with robots. Particularly now, in the relatively early days of encountering robots in our daily lives, we don’t instinctively know how to read a robot the way we do a person. Some attempts at directing us are more elegant than others: Jaguar affixed fake eyes to prototype autonomous vehicles it road-tested in England to try to make pedestrians more confident that the vehicles could see them. It succeeded mainly in making the vehicles look bored.

Jaguar affixed fake eyes to prototype autonomous vehicles to make pedestrians feel more confident that the vehicles could see them. Photo: Jaguar Land Rover

A key task for roboticists is avoiding what McGinn calls “unbalanced design,” where user expectations differ from the machine’s actual ability. This is why even though the presence of a mouth makes a robot seem friendlier, Cakmak would still caution designers against slapping one on, as the presence of a mouth that doesn’t communicate verbally would be confusing to users.

Avoiding unbalanced design is a keystone of ethical robot design. A designer less concerned about ethics could use those same familiar markers to mislead people about their robot’s purposes. Users will automatically turn their gazes toward a friendly, inviting face, something that the designers of robotic photographers and temperature scanners have taken advantage of. It’s one thing if it’s been disclosed to you that a robot will be taking your photograph or biometric information, and something else if not.

Agility intends Digit to be a useful, unobtrusive tool that can take over “dirty, dangerous, and repetitive” work from humans, Hurst said, and with greater efficiency. The company envisions customers using fleets of Digits to achieve a level of productivity that humans can’t achieve, with their bathroom breaks and strained muscles and need for sleep and food. Even if it’s not the stated intention, such a development would almost certainly come at the expense of human jobs.

Photo: Agility Robotics

On a Zoom demonstration of the robot in action, I found myself thinking of dystopian scenarios a lot more than I usually do when a company is showing off their creation. Hurst jostled the robot and it took short quick steps to regain its balance, just like a person would. He gave it a hard shove, and before it hit the floor its arms shot forward to break its fall. As the robot raised itself back to a standing position, I imagined an army of headless robots doing the same thing. Digit is no more dangerous than any other social robot, but I was far more willing to question whether it could be. Because the robot didn’t have any way to signal its intentions, I invented my own.

When the next version of Digit is produced, likely in late 2021, it will have a simple head in rough proportion to the rest of its body and a screen “face” with a pair of eyes reminiscent of Wall-E’s Eve. Its eyes will move in the direction that the robot intends to travel, eliminating the element of uncomfortable surprise. The design will be intentionally simple, and more robot-like than humanoid, so as not to communicate a sense of intelligence or personality that isn’t there. This is a tool, after all. And now that the missing head has been pointed out to Hurst, he gets it.

“Right now that looks like the Beetlejuice guy, the shrunken head guy,” he said. “It’s not right.”