My colleague is not “human”: Will working with robots make you act more indifferently?

Abstract Service warmth, defined as kindness, sincerity and helpfulness experienced by customers, is a critical component of service delivery. Using a combination of questionnaire surveys and roleplay experiments involving customers, employees, and their supervisors, this study investigated how employee service…

S&T researchers’ study of human-robot interactions an early step in creating future robot “guides”

A new study by Missouri S&T researchers shows how human subjects, walking hand-in-hand with a robot guide, stiffen or relax their arms at different times during the walk. The researchers’ analysis of these movements could aid in the design of smarter, more humanlike robot guides and assistants.“This work presents the first measurement and analysis of human arm stiffness during overground physical interaction between a robot leader and a human follower,” the Missouri S&T researchers write in a paper recently published in the Nature journal Scientific Reports.

Introducing GTGraffiti: The Robot That Paints Like a Human

Graduate students at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built the first graffiti-painting robot system that mimics the fluidity of human movement. Aptly named GTGraffiti, the system uses motion capture technology to record human painting motions and then composes and processes the gestures to program a cable-driven robot that spray paints graffiti artwork.