Back in 2019, MIT graduate student Daniella DiPaola and I began to frequent our local grocery store, and not to shop for food. The store had introduced a robot that we wanted to see in action. The 1.9m-tall machine roamed the aisles, scanning the floor for spills and paging the employees to clean up hazards. But what interested us most was that, despite its large googly eyes and friendly name, Marty the robot was unpopular with customers.
As robots come into shared spaces, people tend to have strong positive or negative reactions, often taking engineers by surprise. But the key to designing automated systems may be simple: recognising that people treat robots as if they're alive.
Even though robots have been building cars in factories for a while, we've seen a more recent wave of deployments in areas where they interact with people. Whether they're doing the hoovering or delivering food, robots are increasingly entering our workplaces, homes and public spaces.
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