Author: Maria Temming / Source: Science News
HONOLULU — The notion of ownership comes so easily to humans that even preschoolers have got it down.
Robots, on the other hand, often struggle to grasp such abstract concepts.Now researchers have programmed a well-mannered robot that can learn who owns what, as well as what it’s allowed to do with people’s belongings.
Teaching robots ownership-related etiquette “is really, really important,” says Matthias Scheutz, a computer scientist and human-robot interaction researcher at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., not involved in the work. You can’t just send out robots “who are blissfully unaware of who owns what.… If I instruct a robot ‘build a fence,’ and it goes to the neighbor’s and starts [stealing] boards, that’s not what we have in mind,” he says.
The new socially conscious robot, to be described February 1 at the
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