Robots for health and child care of the future?
Controversial 'PaPeRos' show their colours at La Trobe
Associate Professor Rajiv Khosla with one of the robots.
Awe-inspiring – and perhaps a trifle unsettling – the forerunners of the next generation of baby sitters and aged care attendants have arrived in Australia.
Standing a little taller than your average vacuum cleaner, Jackson and Matilda are critical players in global research into advanced intelligent communications robots for the health care industry.
To help them interact with their charges and patients, they are ‘evolving’ their ‘emotional’ faculties in a new joint research venture between Melbourne’s La Trobe University and Japan’s Kyoto University, in collaboration with their ‘maker’ – the global electronics giant, NEC Corporation.
Jackson and Matilda are NEC’s PaPeRo – Partner Personal Robots – recently described in an ABC science program, All in the Mind, as the ‘cream’ of the current crop of communication robots.
First time in Australia
They are visiting La Trobe University’s new Research Centre for Computers, Communication and Social Innovation (RECCSI) for the next two years and were starring exhibits at the recent Bundoora campus Open Day.
‘This is the first time these robots have been in Australia – and it was an extremely rare chance to see these icons of next generation robotics in action,’ says the Centre’s Director, Associate Professor Rajiv Khosla.
The robots can tell jokes, converse, move around, their faces lighting up when they recognise people, and connect to the internet, transmitting images to third parties.
‘We may have become blasé about industrial robots and the exploits of military robotics on the evening news,’ he says. However, Dr Khosla concedes the concept of intelligent robots programmed to respond to emotional issues, ‘is something most people still have trouble getting their heads around.’
The machines, he says, are already capable of reading basic emotions via face- recognition software, which then informs their actions.
The establishment of RECCSI on La Trobe University’s Research and Development Park in Bundoora earlier this year aims to take emotionally intelligent computer systems across their next frontier. Dean of Law and Management, Professor Raymond Harbridge,says that, linked by high definition video with NEC in Japan, the La Trobe Centre is a collaborative hub for interdisciplinary research in human resource management, tourism, organisational innovation, health and aged care, cross-cultural communication, and robotics.
The Centre – supported by a million dollars in grants and contributions from its partners over the next three years – has its roots in research into context-aware emotion-based systems and conversational informatics by Dr Khosla and Kyoto University’s Professor Toyoaki Nishida. Their collaboration involves, among other things, the measurement and analysis of conversational interactions.
Says Professor Nishida: ‘We are attempting to uncover principles of verbal and nonverbal interactions that people engage in everyday as a part of intellectual activities and then develop new technologies to help society derive additional benefits from conversational interactions.’
First project off the rank are the emotionally intelligent health care robots, currently being developed with a third team of researchers at NEC Japan. This group is led by Dr Keiji Yamada, General Manager, of NEC Computer and Communications Innovation Research Laboratories.
‘Designed to assist senior citizens, such robots will exercise their own intelligence to evaluate the emotional state of patients for example before and after the surgery in hospitals and in health care clinics. They will also assist carers of children with mental health or development disorders.’
Dr Khosla says as well as health care, other emotionally-savvy technology is being developed to assist human resources managers recruit and benchmark new staff and provide companion ‘drivers’ – or passenger robots – to monitor driver fatigue and help reduce road fatalities.
‘There are also web-based intelligent robots for the tourist industry to match people’s emotional preferences to their choice of holiday destination, “persuasive dialogue systems” to help the elderly in their daily lives, and emotionally intelligent “security” robots to assist with criminal investigations and antiterrorist detection.’
He says the centre’s main aim is to promote inter-disciplinary research in social sciences and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs).
‘We are shifting the design focus away from convenience towards social innovation and areas important to society by improving the quality of life at work and in other areas.
‘The project is to fundamentally alter the way ICTs process data and information in organisations and lifestyle situations in which people are involved.’
NEC’s Dr Yamada agrees. ‘We strongly expect that this research will open up a new vista in research and design of ICTs and robots, to fulfil human potential and deepen mutual understanding,’ he adds.
The collaboration also provides research internships for La Trobe postgraduate students of three to six month at Kyoto University and NEC in Japan.