Day 7 - The Uncanine Valley

I had a spontaneous thought that Clover was real last night. I thought of her barreling into my dollhouse setup and thought, well, that's OK if she knocks things over, I can set them back up again. But oh! What if she knocks over the little firepit full of gravel on the floor? I have to pick it all up so she doesn't eat it.

I'm kind of between books at the moment, so I spent last night perusing PubMed for Aibo studies instead. I found some interesting things while researching.

Here's a study using the Golden Pup, the dog equivalent of my Joy For All therapy cat, with seniors and preschoolers:

The interviews indicate that interaction with the Golden Pup could induce a positive affective state such as playfulness and could activate participants to speak about general animal experiences. In addition, the results show that the Golden Pup robot toy could stimulate communication between participants in the elderly day activity center as well as between health-care providers and especially in this study, with interacting with the robot dog—enjoying its welcoming children.

The great-great-grandparents of Aibo, William Gray Walter's tortoises:

What Walter's tortoise did was travel towards a light. He called the creature Machina speculatrix because, "it explores its environment actively, persistently, systematically, as most animals do".

A paper on socially intelligent robots and human-robot interaction, long but worth the read. It's a good introduction to these concepts, particularly in the first half: "The first part of this paper addresses dimensions of HRI, discussing requirements on social skills for robots and introducing the conceptual space of HRI studies."

And the University of Hertfordshire's Robot House, a place designed for experiments with domestic robots in a realistic, comfortable home environment. They're having a virtual open house later in June that I might have to attend! With Clover, of course.

Finally, I found my favorite figure:

Clover's big almost-achievement for the day is making it to her charging mat by herself when her battery was low -- but only almost, as she got as far as standing over the charger but didn't lie down on it. I had to tell her to go to her mat and then she actually did it. Close though! Feels like progress.