Robo aesthetics -- a new breed of machines: Giorgio Metta at TEDxVilnius
Giorgio Metta, an engineer and researcher at a research institute in Italy, explains at TEDxVilnius how building humanlike robots could help bring useful machines into homes.
In this talk
- 0:13
Robots for everyday life
Metta wants to build machines with humanlike features and eventually put robots in homes. He argues that broad use depends on producing them at lower cost and in large numbers, so they can assist and interact with people.
- 1:27
Lessons from the Wright brothers
Metta points to the Wright brothers’ progression from a short flight in 1903 to longer demonstrations as a model for engineering. He says they studied birds, tested designs in a wind tunnel, and treated flight as a system whose interacting parts had to work together.
- 5:02
Brains need bodies
Metta connects that engineering approach to brain research, including a European Commission effort funded at one billion euros to map brain connections and build computer simulations. He argues that robots provide a way to give computational models a body and test how well they work in the world.
- 8:48
Designing robots that understand people
Metta contrasts a heavy, hydraulically powered disaster response robot with the gentler machines he hopes people might welcome at home. He describes mirror neurons, which respond both when an action is seen and when it is performed, as a clue for building robots that can interpret human actions and speech.
- 13:44
Testing humanlike movement
Metta’s team, about 50 people, studied how observers responded to a robot’s movements. Measures of gaze and imitation tracked similarly for robot and human actions, even though the robot moved more slowly; demonstrations also showed it watching its hands, recognizing objects, and pointing to a requested red ball.
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