"Social Roboticist" Heather Knight Wants You To Hug Your Robot: Video
Posted by Jordan_Keenan on Wednesday, Jul 07, 2010
Heather Knight wants you to like robots. Really like them.
When we met this young roboticist at the Humanity+ Summit at Harvard last month, she demonstrated Nao, a robot she helped develop, and talked to Motherboard about why she likes robots, how she got into robots, and how she envisions them developing personalities so that they might better charm humans – and not just with killer Michael Jackson dance moves. “I’d love excited people in New York coming up with the next Woody Allen robot, rather than some cloistered researcher.”
The young founder of New York-based Marilyn Monrobot Labs, Heather calls herself a “Social Roboticist”, which could not be a more apt name. She’s worked with robots at MIT’s Media Lab, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Synn Labs and elsewhere. But Heather wants to see robots everywhere – in the entertainment industry, schools, hospitals, and other venues where a socially interactive robot could greatly enhance quality of life, just like they’re starting to do in Japan.
Instead of robots built in labs, serving humans on customer service lines, or stirring up fears of a Terminator-esque future, she wants humans to be thinking about how to make robots happier, more loving beings. “They do it for dogs on occasion that have been abused,” she says. “Why cant we find a way for robots to fit into our society in a beneficial way?”
Nao, developed by French robotics company Aldebaran , has just recently rocketed to fame after wowing audiences at the France Pavillion at the Shanghai Expo.
Make sure to watch to the end to see Nao’s sleep procedure, and see Nao’s promo video here:
See our other robot coverage, including our documentary on Tatsuya Matsui, our chat with Hiroshi Ishiguro, ruminations on human-like robot fears check back soon for more Interface segments from Motherboard’s visit to the H+ Summit
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