Robot mom would beat robot butler in popularity contest

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa - If you tickle a robot, it may not laugh, but you may still consider it humanlike - depending on its role in your life, reports an international group of researchers. Designers and engineers assign robots specific roles, such as servant, caregiver, assistant or playmate. Researchers found that people expressed more positive feelings toward a robot that would take care of them than toward a robot that needed care. "For robot designers, this means greater emphasis on role assignments to robots," said S. Shyam Sundar , Distinguished Professor of at Penn State and co-director of University's Media Effects Research Laboratory. "How the robot is presented to users can send important signals to users about its helpfulness and intelligence, which can have consequences for how it is received by end users." To determine how human perception of a robot changed based on its role, researchers observed 60 interactions between college students and Nao , a social robot developed by Aldebaran Robotics, a French company specializing in humanoid robots. Each interaction could go one of two ways. The human could help Nao calibrate its eyes, or Nao could examine the human's eyes like a concerned eye doctor and make suggestions to improve vision.