We need a robot that can work with social cues

It’s Monday, the start of another work week and more and more of us will spending it with robots of one kind or another. In fact, the number of our robot coworkers is growing by almost 3 percent each year in industrialized countries.

With that growth comes a growing problem, custom created to drive a human resources executive mad: How to make humans work well with their cybernetic colleagues?

It’s not a new worry. Even when they were just a gleam in a sci-fi writer’s eye, working relationships between man and machine have been tricky.

Remember HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey?” He sure wouldn’t open those pod-bay doors no matter how many times Dave asked him. Now in that case, the problem was a psychotic computer who put the mission over human life.

The problem in real life, according to Dr. Jim Young with the University of Manitoba is that we humans don’t see robots as, well, robots.

“We all have funny stories, talking about our cars or our computers as ‘he’ or ‘she,’ but with robots &#8212 the research has been finding &#8212 it’s more so. People really can’t help treating them like living things,” Young said.

Young’s team found “people interpret how a robot moves- fast, slow, soft or jerky motions, etc. in emotional terms.”

We humans argue with them. We get upset if they malfunction or break. We attribute motivations and personalities to them. We keep trying to understand them.

So Dr. Young says we need to make our machines understandable &#8212 through social cues.

“If a robot has eyes, it should direct them at the task or person at hand,” Young said. “It should use them appropriately. A robot who just stares at its feet or up in the sky, and has a smile plastered on it’s face even when it’s criticizing you &#8212 that’s just creepy and wrong.”

Other examples: If it’s running low on power, the robot should slow down, slump it’s shoulders if it has them and sigh heavily. If it’s ready to move to the next task, it should shift from foot-to-foot, maybe tap its fingers.

Even if the robot doesn’t have a human form, just adding a tail programmed to show “mood” like man’s best friend would be effective.

Those seem like small things, but Young says a good human/machine partnership means better productivity because as we know from our human-to-human interactions &#8212 poor social skills lead to misunderstandings, frustration and reduced productivity.

And you can’t get those pod bay doors open when you really need to.