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Do robots need heads?


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15 August 2013



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Robohub.org - robot_facial_expressionsRobots are machines and most people agree that they primarily serve a utilitarian purpose. So why do so many of them have heads? Here are some thoughts by AJung Moon, Mark Stephen Meadows, Travis Deyle, and David Robert.

 

 

AJung Moon
AJung Moon on “Do robots need heads?”

Are you curious about what your future robotic assistants will look like? My bet is that by the time you buy your very first robotic butler, it will have a friendly head on it that moves. In fact, it would be a good idea to make robots with heads if they are intended to share spaces and objects with people. That’s because …

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Mark Stephen Meadows
Mark Stephen Meadows on “Do robots need heads?”

I don’t know about you, but if something has a head I assume it has thoughts. When watching a movie I stare at the character’s face because I want to know what they feel. So for me a head’s a pretty important thing. If I’m going to talk with a robot, …

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Travis Deyle
Travis Deyle on “Do robots need heads?”

The obvious answer to this question is “No: there are lots of robots without heads.” It’s not even clear that social robots necessarily require a head, …

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David Robert
David Robert on “Do robots need heads?”

As a robot animator I can attest to the fact that robots don’t “need” heads to be treated as social entities. Research has shown that people will befriend a stick as long as it moves properly. We have a long-standing habit of anthropomorphizing things that aren’t human by attributing to them human-level personality traits or internal motivations based on cognitive-affective architectures that just aren’t there. …

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