Dogs' Surprising Interaction With Robots
- 11 years ago
Man’s best friend doesn’t mind also being friendly with robots.
Man’s best friend doesn’t mind also being friendly with robots.
A new study shows that dogs will take cues from telepresence robots if they display social interaction characteristics.
The researchers studied dogs as their owners walked into the room and interacted with a robot called PeopleBot, as if it were human.
The PeopleBot was programmed with two different conditions, one that responded socially to the dog’s owner using a pre-recorded human voice, and one that was asocial and just made beeping noises and had to be typed into rather than spoken to.
Results show that the dogs in the study took commands and followed the cues of the robot in social mode more than in asocial mode.
According to the study, which was published in the journal called Animal Cognition: “…gestures of the socially behaving robot were easier for the dogs to comprehend than gestures of the asocially behaving robot…the level of sociality shown by the robot was not enough to elicit the same set of social behaviors from the dogs as was possible with humans, although sociality had a positive effect on dog–robot interactions.”
Man’s best friend doesn’t mind also being friendly with robots.
A new study shows that dogs will take cues from telepresence robots if they display social interaction characteristics.
The researchers studied dogs as their owners walked into the room and interacted with a robot called PeopleBot, as if it were human.
The PeopleBot was programmed with two different conditions, one that responded socially to the dog’s owner using a pre-recorded human voice, and one that was asocial and just made beeping noises and had to be typed into rather than spoken to.
Results show that the dogs in the study took commands and followed the cues of the robot in social mode more than in asocial mode.
According to the study, which was published in the journal called Animal Cognition: “…gestures of the socially behaving robot were easier for the dogs to comprehend than gestures of the asocially behaving robot…the level of sociality shown by the robot was not enough to elicit the same set of social behaviors from the dogs as was possible with humans, although sociality had a positive effect on dog–robot interactions.”