Boxie Robot: Using cuteness to garner information and insight

If you were told to describe the characteristics of a good robot or a journalist, would you have ever thought of the word 'cuteness'? This discovery has been exploited to the maximum by Alexander Reben when he created Boxie at the MIT Media lab. The need behind the idea for the robot was for interviewing people and gathering information and feedback. While people generally have the tendency to avoid interviewers, human or robot, they seem to be genetically built to appreciate and 'fall' for cuteness. Boxie has been designed as a cute robot with whom people just cannot resist interacting with.

Boxie robot

Boxie keeps moving about the floor crying out for attention and help. Somebody is bound to notice and Boxie's cuteness ensures that those who do notice are instantly won over. In a cute voice when Boxie requests to be picked up it gets its way and the cameras installed in its 'eyes' can record the conversation from the correct height. By sheer virtue of its cuteness, Boxie interacts with his human 'friends' to garner information and insight.

The robot makes use of ultrasound sonar to detect and avoid banging into walls and obstacles. The same sonar helps it balance and remain straight in all its movements. The inbuilt heat sensors help to detect human presence and that triggers it into an interactive mode. It has an inbuilt script for asking questions which it does in between requests to be 'carried and shown' around. All these get recorded on its memory card. Its battery lasts about 6-7 hours and on a good day, Boxie does about 10-15 interviews.

Boxie is not very intelligent. A large dog could fool its thermal sensors. People who pick it up can mistreat it and rubbish it. The computerized brain is not very sophisticated. Yet, it avoids most of these difficult situations by being cute and arousing in people the instincts that a baby arouses. In fact, when Boxie was originally planned as a robot with a white plastic body, everyone concerned voted strongly for the cardboard mock up, forcing the designers to maintain the same look. The plastic body seemed to give it a deathly look. The cardboard box face is reminiscent of Wall-E, the cute robot, and ensures that the robot does its interview work well.

The success of Boxie drives home a very important point. Technical superiority or intelligence are lesser factors compared to social acceptability when it comes to interacting with other people. With its infantile likability, Boxie gets away with its 'lack of intelligence' and ' simplicity'. But still it has fared much better than better equipped robots. This strongly sends the message that future smart machines need to be high on social intelligence more than anything else by making use of the appropriate gestures, postures and non-verbal communication.

It seems that even cuteness has its limitations. As measured from the accelerometers and force sensors located in its chassis, Boxie has been manhandled quite a few times. Again, that holds a lesson in social behavior for all future designers - don't become nagging.

Via: FastCoDesign