Adriana Tapus has studied human-robot interaction (HRI) long enough to expect the unexpected.

"When you work with people, you have many, many surprises. You cannot know exactly what the human will do next and many things come up that you didn't expect," says Tapus, associate professor ENSTA-ParisTech, who builds assistive robotics architectures and investigates HRI in therapeutic environments.

Tapus tells of a patient recovering from a stroke who tried to cheat a therapeutic bot during a musical game designed to improve the rehabilitation process. There was no personal gain involved, says Tapus: beyond the satisfaction of outwitting the bot, that is.

"These are things that we couldn't imagine when we designed the system [...] Humans are unpredictable," says Tapus.

For example, young children interacting with the humanoid NAO bot -- a central figure in Tapus' current research -- often instinctively kiss the bot's head, says Tapus. And, if NAO's eyes turn red, the children ask researchers why the bot is upset.

But one elderly woman's relationship with Bandit (a humanoid bot developed by the University of South California's Interaction Lab) provides the most tantalising glimpse into the kind of small, human drama that could be played out hundreds of thousands of times in the future, if robots become more commonplace in our daily lives.

As part of a long-term study of the ways people and bots interact in therapeutic settings, Tapus had Bandit play a musical game with people suffering from dementia. The "Song Discovery" game (loosely based on the television game show "Name That Tune") was specially designed to help dementia patients maintain their attention levels.

The elderly patient played with Bandit twice a week over a period of about eight months. Each session lasted about an hour.

"She looked forward to the interaction. She really liked to hear the music and play the game," explains Tapus.

The fieldwork was a success. Many participants demonstrated improved cognitive performance over the course of the eight months and the research demonstrated some of the benefits of using bots in therapeutic settings. Their fieldwork complete, the team took Bandit back to the lab to assess the data collected and start work on their scientific papers.

But the story didn't end there for the elderly patient.

Faced with the reality that Bandit wasn't coming back, she became very distressed.

"She was depressed," says Tapus. "The robot had shown nice, encouraging behavior towards her."

But Bandit was gone.

As things turned out, over a period of about three weeks, the elderly patient's distress faded and everything went back to normal.

But is it possible that in the future, when humans and bots live side by side, day after day, sharing experiences and forming relationships-of-sorts with each other, that the elderly patient's sense of loss will not just be a normal experience, but a typical experience?

How will we react when a loyal humanoid bot that has served us for years suddenly fails? Will we genuinely grieve for no-longer working bots that have accompanied us through so much of our lives?

And when bots die, will we treat them like cherished family pets and bury them in our gardens (or robot graveyards)? Will we place the deceased bots' body in a glass case in the livingroom? Or keep a head on the mantlepiece as a memento?

"No" says Tapus. "We get upset when our coffee machine is not working anymore but we don't bury it. Robots are machines that can help us and that's all."

Tapus argues that the old lady became distressed because an activity she enjoyed had been terminated, not because of any "attachment to the robot itself."

Christoph Bartneck, senior lecturer at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand, disagrees.

"Robots show intentional behavior, which we otherwise only associate with animals. Hence, we encounter a situation in which robots appear to be alive and only our rational thinking tells us that they are not," says Bartneck. "But our rational thinking is the weaker part of our brain. I think that we will have a similar relationship with robots as we have today with pets."


  1. Interesting but I can't follow the thought process that to have emotions for a robot is irrational but to have emotional attachment to a human or animal is rational? The very definition of emotion is that it is irrational.Besides, fundamentally everything is composed of the same quantum matter anyway.  

    Oct 11th 2011
  2. Does this mean that in the future we're going to be haunted by robot ghosts?  

    Oct 11th 2011
  3. First I'd throw a robot wake (any excuse!) and then when the beer runs out I'd blast it into space for a spectacular reentry.. timothy leary-style!! Besides that it would be quite a sad occasion. *sniffle*  

    Oct 11th 2011
  4. I used to read my sister's old books of the comic strip 'Peanuts', and the character named Linus had his security blanket that he couldn't be parted from. So like a toy doll or teddy bear, none of these are 'alive' but yet there is an emotional contact - albeit maybe an irrational one to others, yet it still exists in the mind of the beholder. So yes, on a parallel I could easily see a similar attachment between a human and a robot! I could also see a 'recycled' robot not having the same bond (so to speak) with a human - I mean do art enthusiasts not want the original instead of the copy though it may appear the same?! As for me as a child, I had a piece of cloth shaped like bacon that never left my side, which might explain my attachment to the grill pan..!Interesting article and well written.....more of the same please.  

    Oct 16th 2011

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