Skip to 0 minutes and 5 secondsI work with a robot called Miro that was developed here at Sheffield Robotics in conjunction with some external partners. And inside Miro there is a model of emotion that's based on the continuum model of
Skip to 0 minutes and 5 secondsI work with a robot called Miro that was developed here at Sheffield Robotics in conjunction with some external partners. And inside Miro there is a model of emotion that's based on the continuum model of emotion, and this is the idea that instead of having discrete emotions, all emotions sort of work on a continuum. And we use the Posner's affect emotion model within the robot. It's very, very simple to programme such a thing. We use coloured lights in the shell of Miro in order to express the affect. You can slow down or speed up the particular colour lights in order to display, alongside its basic behavioural movements, an emotion.
Skip to 0 minutes and 50 secondsAnd when I say emotion, I of course mean "emotion," because it's whatever the human user is perceiving. But if you imagine that the Miro robot is flashing, quite quickly, a green colour, which is a calm colour, he's sort of in happy playful mode, whereas if you switch that to a red colour, he would be a bit angry. We can use really nice, simple models from psychology in order to build models of affect in robots, and that's one of the great uses that psychology has within robotics.
Skip to 1 minute and 23 secondsWhat we're introducing into our environments is a new type of social agent with which a human being can have a relationship, which you can't influence to the extent you would your mobile phone, but which does have the potential to influence you in being somewhere along the lines of being alive but not being alive. As researchers start to explore that dynamic more, I'm hoping there'll be enough understanding that we'll be prepared for whatever kind of results will occur in the future on the basis of the introduction of such advanced technology. Robots are going to be useful in educational settings, helping teachers, particularly giving one-on-one attention to children, scaffolding their learning of things like reading, writing, arithmetic, perhaps even more advanced subjects.
Skip to 2 minutes and 16 secondsRobots right now are not very intelligent. We can't expect a robot to act like a teacher, to understand the world like a teacher, and to be able to communicate. So what a robot can do is it can help a child that is trying to learn by being a kind of co-learner and by giving