Everybody knows that anthropomorphic robots that try to look and act like people are creepy. There's been a bunch of research into just what it is about such androids that we don't like (watch the video below to get an idea of what we're talking about), and many researchers think that we get uncomfortable when we begin to lose the ability to confidently distinguish between what's human and what's not. This is why zombies are often placed at the very bottom of the Uncanny Valley: in many respects, they directly straddle that line, which is why they freak us out so much. The tricky part about robots, however, is that they can manifest "human-ness" in ways that are more than just physical. When robots start acting like humans, as opposed to just looking like them, things can get much more complicated.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your highly automated* Automaton bloggers. We'll be also posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Mark your calendars: the premiere of NOVA's "Rise of the Robots" is in less than two weeks! Loyal readers of this blog will probably recognize all of the robots and most of the people in the trailer, but it looks like NOVA--which bills itself as "the most-watched primetime science series on television"--scored some great expert commentary along with footage of DRC robots that we've never seen before.

There's been a lot of research on how humans interact with robots. In fact, there's a whole field for it called HRI (Human-Robot Interaction), with its own flagship conference (that IEEE co-sponsors) going on right now in New Zealand. The majority of the research in this field focuses on how humans interact with social robots, including home robots, commercial robots, and educational robots and toys, but odds are, if you personally own a robot, it's going to be either a vacuum or a drone. As drones have become more and more pervasive over the last few years, HRI research on them has been expanding. The latest contribution to this area is a fascinating paper being presented at the HRI conference on "Emotion Encoding in Human-Drone Interaction."

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your mysophobic Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. XDog is a small electric quadruped designed and built by Xing Wang, a graduate student at Shanghai University, with support from his adviser Jia Wenchuan. The robot has 12 motors (each leg has 3 DoF), and uses force sensors on each foot, IMU, and joint-angle sensors for control.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your starving Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Domino's in New Zealand (or Australia, we're not sure) has developed this pizza-delivery robot and I can't tell if they're serious or not: The New Zealand government at least, is taking them seriously, according to Stuff.co.nz: Transport Minister Simon Bridges said Domino's had made contact "a few weeks ago" to inform the Government about DRU and see if New Zealand was interested in hosting trials.

For many people with dementia, moving out of their house and into a care home can be an inevitable and devastating side effect. Spatial and visual problems can accompany the more well-known memory loss, making it difficult for people to get around their once familiar homes. But a new app has been designed to help carers for people with dementia work out how to arrange furniture in their houses, which could allow their loved ones to stay at home for longer. The app will suggest improvements to make carers' homes more accessible to those with dementia. The'Dementia-Friendly Home' app, launched today, uses interactive 3D game technology to come up with ideas for carers to make their homes more accessible for those with dementia.

Suresh Venkatasubramanian of the University of Utah presented a method for finding disparate impact in algorithms last year at the ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. If you have ever searched for hotel rooms online, you have probably had this experience: surf over to another website to read a news story and the page fills up with ads for travel sites, offering deals on hotel rooms in the city you plan to visit. Buy something on Amazon, and ads for similar products will follow you around the Web. The practice of profiling people online means companies get more value from their advertising dollars and users are more likely to see ads that interest them. The practice has a downside, though, when the profiling is based on sensitive attributes, such as race, sex, or sexual orientation.

We have developed a visualization system of dementia care skills based on multimodal communication features. The purpose of our system is to provide effective learning of dementia care to trainees. As dementia care skills are difficult to visualize and describe, they are hard to acquire for trainees. We focus on HumanitudeR; a non-pharmacological comprehensive intervention with verbal and non-verbal communication, which is a care methodology of French-origin for the vulnerable elderlies. The multimodal methodology utilizes four techniques to relate to elderly with dementia (i.e., gaze, speak, touch, opportunities to stand on their feet). We analyzed the care videos of Humanitude instructors to extract multimodal communication features. We designed and filmed video contents demonstrating the extracted features. These have shown to be effective, in combination with practice and reflection, to acquire dementia care skills. The trainees could use the system for self-reflection and teaching.

Robots collaborating with humans need to represent knowledge, reason, and learn, at the sensorimotor level and the cognitive level. This paper summarizes the capabilities of an architecture that combines the comple- mentary strengths of declarative programming, proba- bilistic graphical models, and reinforcement learning, to represent, reason with, and learn from, qualitative and quantitative descriptions of incomplete domain knowledge and uncertainty. Representation and reasoning is based on two tightly-coupled domain representations at different resolutions. For any given task, the coarse- resolution symbolic domain representation is translated to an Answer Set Prolog program, which is solved to provide a tentative plan of abstract actions, and to explain unexpected outcomes. Each abstract action is implemented by translating the relevant subset of the corresponding fine-resolution probabilistic representation to a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Any high probability beliefs, obtained by the execution of actions based on the POMDP policy, update the coarse-resolution representation. When incomplete knowledge of the rules governing the domain dynamics results in plan execution not achieving the desired goal, the coarse-resolution and fine-resolution representations are used to formulate the task of incrementally and interactively discovering these rules as a reinforcement learning problem. These capabilities are illustrated in the context of a mobile robot deployed in an indoor office domain.

Certain stimuli in the environment reliably, and perhaps inevitably, trigger human cognitive and behavioral responses. We suggest that the presence of such “trigger stimuli” in modern robots can have disconcerting consequences. We provide one new example of such consequences: a reversal of a pattern of moral judgments people make about robots, depending on whether they view a “mechanical” or a “humanoid” robot.