This Industrial Designer Trains Robots to Play Nicely With Humans
Carla Diana explains how social design makes embodied AIs ready for bio-based society in MY ROBOT GETS ME (Harvard Business Review Press, March 30)
Robots are now a common sight in certain workplaces: within assembly lines at manufacturing plants, on the International Space Station assessing radiation levels, doing supermarket shelf stock checks in dark stores, and working as medical aides in hospitals.
They’re good for what’s known as the “3 x Ds” — carrying out the dirty, dangerous and dull tasks that humans need not (or don’t want to) do anymore. But now there’s a “4th D” — “delightful” — for robots who are engineered to work on a more socially-integrated basis with us humans, and that’s the business industrial designer Carla Diana is in.
Training initially as a mechanical engineer, Carla Diana got her Masters at Cranbrook Academy of Art, was then a key member of the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology, founded the Smart Interaction Lab at NY-based innovation design firm Smart Design, and now has her own practice. Best known for designing Diligent Robotics’ MOXI, the helpful hospital aide, we spoke recently about her book MY ROBOT GETS ME (Harvard Business Review Press), which comes out March 30th.
“Within the field of robotics,” said Carla Diana, “Smart is not enough anymore. Robotic-based product designs, whether embodied or device-based, need to be designed with an awareness of social cues, because the better the interaction, the deeper a relationship we can form with them, and the greater our experience of them will be.”
MY ROBOT GETS ME is designed as both a general guide to the future, albeit a more benign vision of what’s next than most books in the marketplace, and a deep dive into how one creates a socially-adept silicon-based being. In her book, Carla Diana goes through the building blocks of how she codes for seamless Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), as indications of intelligence.
“We program robots through modeling interactions, to let their human owners know they’ve understood commands via audio and visual based response feedback loops,” she told me. “For example, the robot known as SIMON, which I worked on at Georgia Tech, can lower its ears as if to say: I’m sorry I messed up. I care about getting this right. And MOXI, working in a busy hospital environment, is programmed to say excuse me as it passes people in the hallway. These social clues enable robots to integrate within human society, and us to accept them.”
Although COVID-19 was not on anyone’s radar when she started writing the book, Carla Diana admits that the pandemic has jumpstarted acceptance of robots, because many have become intermediaries between us, during isolation and lockdown, especially within overburdened elder care communities.
“My mother suffers from dementia and, when the pandemic hit, restrictions meant I could not visit her, so devices to facilitate face to face calling became a lifeline. But a goal of my work is increasing presence — of going beyond the tablet-based screen and into more embodied, robotic-style tools like the Intuition Robotics’ ElliQ. This has a robotic head which lights up when a call comes in, and pivots to bring attention, awaiting an answer. It can understand the person’s response, and is engineered to continually take into account a number of factors regarding the person’s overall health. For example, a number of refused calls will raise the alarm and request human intervention. This type of functionality rarely works without engineering real presence into a robotic device.”
“Presence” is a tricky concept to convey, especially to those who’ve never met a robot. Even Carla Diana admits that it’s spooky to those who know, all too well, what’s going on “under the hood”. When based at Georgia Tech, and working on the SIMON robot platform, she recalls getting wrapped up in the “illusion of life” as SIMON went through its paces, conveying “intelligence”:
“It made me understand, without a doubt, how powerful a tool presence could be, and the ideas for my book started to coalesce back then. I wanted to break down, into components, how we build in interaction intelligence. I wanted to show how complex it is to design for human-robot spaces.”
While robots on the assembly lines at vehicular factories just get the job done, those which we need to help us, especially at home, or, like MOXI, working alongside us in medical environments, need significant interpersonal up-skilling.
Elements Carla Diana details in her book include: gesture recognition (waving at a robot can be recognized by a camera, or other imaging device, to alert them to action); capacitive sensing (running a hand along the robot’s surface interrupts the electrostatic field and wakes them up); movement detectors (metal ball inside a cylindrical chamber tells the robot which way is up) and microcontrollers — i.e. triggering voltage on an input pin — (aka pressing a button to you and me).
So, if you’re looking to comprehend why you’re inexplicably bonded to your ROOMBA, or feel totally understood by the various smart speakers at your house, MY ROBOT GETS ME will show you exactly how they were trained to worm their way into your heart.
Want to know more about MOXI’s creators Diligent Robotics? Here’s a piece I wrote earlier for Ziff Davis PCMag.
More robot stories? Here you go. You’re most welcome.
//ENDS
S.C. Stuart is an award-winning futurist (and sci-fi writer), technology commentator and strategist focusing on AI, DARPA, exoskeletons, NASA, medical/military innovation, robots and virtual humans for companies including 20th Century Fox, DTCC (Wall Street), Four Seasons, Milken Institute, Nano (empowering global human health), New Line Cinema, RAND Corporation, Smithsonian and Sony Pictures. Published in ELLE China, Esquire Latin America, Four Seasons Magazine (global), Mosaic (Morgan Stanley), Singularity Hub and Ziff Davis PCMag.