Can a Robot Love?

Top roboticist Magnus Egerstedt explores whether robots can love in the UCI Robot Ecology Lab, where his altruistic robots take cues from animals. Egerstedt is the dean of the UCI Samueli School of Engineering and the creator of the SlothBot, RaccoonBot and the Robotarium, a swarm robot lab which has been used by over 7,000 researchers.

Transcript:

 [People laughing]

MAGNUS EGERSTEDT: Raccoonbot!

[people clapping and having fun]

NATALIE TSO, HOST: That’s the moment the Raccoonbot – a robot shaped like a raccoon - made its debut at Crystal Cove State Beach in Southern California.  The cute robot is the brainchild of Magnus Egerstedt, the dean of UC Irvine’s engineering school who is a philosopher turned roboticist

EGERSTEDT: So let's ask a question. Can I build a robot that feels love?

TSO: Egerstedt is a top roboticist but he has a bachelor’s in philosophy and linguistics.

EGERSTEDT: I got really fascinated by questions around consciousness and mind and what does it mean to feel and to think. And I thought this was super cool. I was probably a little pretentious as a 20-year-old, but after a while I started to get annoyed because all we did was sit around and talk. And I actually started doing robotics almost like applied philosophy. I thought, you know what, these questions can either be solved by us building robots or not. So I really thought of this as I wanted to get at deep questions about humanity by building machines.

TSO: He leads the UCI Robot Ecology Lab that creates altruistic robots modeled after animals. So far, there’s the SlothBot and the RaccoonBot. Egerstedt shares how he got inspired by these animals:

EGERSTEDT: I was on vacation in Costa Rica and I thought sloths were really cool. You know, they they live off the as if a human being would live off a fraction of one of these small potato chips bags a day. They are so energy efficient. And I decided to model behaviorally this robot that I wanted to put out in nature on sloths. And born was the Slothb=Bot. This is a robot under the the tree canopies hanging on a wire and every now and then it goes out from under the tree canopy to sunbathe and recharge the batteries and then it goes back in and measures stuff in the microclimate.

[sfx: raccoonbot moving along a wire]

TSO: This is the sound of its cousin the RaccoonBot moving along its wire.

EGERSTEDT: And then I moved to Southern California and discover our beaches are gorgeous Southern California beaches.

[sounds of music and people at Crystal Cove beach]

And we wanted to put SlothBots on the beach, but they're not indigenous to Southern California. And I was actually down at one of our local beaches here and saw a raccoon digging through a trash can. So we decided, let's turn it into a raccoon instead.

TSO: I asked children at the beach what they thought of the raccoonbot

BOY1: It’s really cool!

BOY2: It’s cute too. With a bow tie.

TSO: It has a bow tie!

BOY2: And it’s on the rope

TSO: Did you know it’s a robot?

Boy2: Well, you just told us, so yeah. (laugh)

TEEN GIRL: I’m wondering what it does?

TSO: It collects environmental data.

TEEN GIRL: Oh, woah, that’s cool.

TSO: What’s up next? An otterbot

EGERSTEDT: We’ve teamed up with the Ocean Institute in Dana Point. So instead of being on a horizontal wire, there'll be a vertical of wire down in the water anchored by a buoy, and it's going to look at the water quality at different depths.

[Sound of deep water]

But it's basically going to climb up and down a wire underwater looking like an adorable otter.

[Sounds of swarm robots at UCI Robot Ecology Lab]

TSO: There’s more to his lab than cute robots. Back at the UCI Robot Ecology Lab, there are these swarm robots you hear that are about the size of your palm. He created the first remotely-accessible swarm robot lab that’s been used by over 7,000 researchers.

EGERSTEDT: So in the lab, we have a setup that we call the robotarium, and it looks like a small ice hockey arena, a rink. And really what it is, it’s just a test bed for testing different kinds of primarily mobility strategies

TSO: His students are working on algorithms to see if the robots can be organically kind and helpful to one another. Postdoctoral researcher Brooks Butler explains:

BUTLER: The idea is that we’re looking at ecology for inspirations and putting together algorithms for robots to work together. It’s essentially the idea that I’m willing to take on a personal cost to help you based off of how related we are. In nature you’d see that as say a mother lioness taking care of her sister’s cub.

For robots we think about instead of thinking of genetic relatedness we think about how do their tasks relate to each other and how can we strategically algorithmically have them sacrifice or perhaps take on additional cost in order to benefit another robot’s task.

I think we're seeing some really interesting results. We're seeing some really organic behavior emerge just naturally without telling the robots explicitly what to do. They behave similar to like a human would.   So if they're trying to get out of each other's way, instead of doing something to suboptimally move directly back, They'll kind of pause and have sometimes that like, Oh, I go this way, oh, you go that way and have a more organic-looking behavior

TSO: Ph.D. student Diana Morales says her robots are sometimes willing to risk their lives for each other which in robotland means run out of batteries.

MORALES: I've also been looking at how we can have robots with different capabilities help each other out to expand what they’re able to do. And sometimes that might mean that you have a robot that's willing to risk their life to see what's out there to give information to another robot and they have a better picture of the world which I think is pretty cool. They can go a lot further if they help each other out that way.

TSO: If robots can act lovingly, can they feel love?

EGERSTEDT: To me, it's. It's an empirical question. I don't think we can, but I think it's more a statement about people than about robots. To be honest, if we look at a robot and say, “Here's a robot that feels love,” then that robot feels love.

TSO: Does Egerestedt think we’ll be cohabitating with robots soon?

EGERSTEDT: In many ways, the robots are already here and there are robotic vacuum cleaners in a lot of houses. We have self-driving cars that are really robots.

What I don't think is tomorrow we're going to have metal humanoids walking around in our houses. Instead, I think the line between an appliance and a robot is just going to get increasingly blurred where our toaster is all of a sudden able to do the dishes and ask us how our day was and all of a sudden that's how we're going to have more robots in our lives.

TSO: What about the common fear that robots might do harm?

 

EGERSTEDT: So I share some of those fears. I think technology can be amazing. It can unlock so much in us. We can be more creative, more productive, healthier, more equal, but it can also go in the direction where they cause major disruptions. This in part is why I took the environmental monitoring route with my robots. I wanted to make sure that I made robots that contribute to the good of the world in some small way.

TSO: What is Egerstedt’s dream robot?

EGERSTEDT: I ultimately want to understand the human mind, and I think robotics is a way of helping us do that. I don't know what the robot looks like, but my dream robot is one that unlocks the mystery of the human mind, which is such a remarkable organ.

[Sounds of swarm robots at UCI Robot Ecology Lab]

TSO: That’s what they’re doing at the UCI Robot Ecology Lab headed by Magnus Egerstedt, the dean of UCI’s engineering school.

This is The Lab Beat brought to you by the UCI Samueli School of Engineering, I’m Natalie Tso.  If you like our podcast, please share it with your friends and join us at the next lab.

(Season 1, Episode 7)