This paper presents a project whereby the Sony AIBO robot (ERS-220 model) was programmed to compose original music in real-time through direct interaction with its environment and people. It begins with a brief introduction to robotic... more
This paper presents a project whereby the Sony AIBO robot (ERS-220 model) was programmed to compose original music in real-time through direct interaction with its environment and people. It begins with a brief introduction to robotic applications in the arts and music. Then it introduces the technical issues encountered in realising the project (namely, AIBO’s functionality and musical intelligence) followed by the proposed solutions. It presents AIBO-Max, a new tool that we implemented for programming AIBO combining Max/MSP and R-Code, and the musical composition system that is used in association with AIBO behaviours to generate the music.
This study investigated the interactions of 72 children (ages 7 to 15) with Sony’s robotic dog AIBO in comparison to a live Australian Shepherd dog. Results showed that more children conceptualized the live dog, as compared to AIBO, as... more
This study investigated the interactions of 72 children (ages 7 to 15) with Sony’s robotic dog AIBO in comparison to a live Australian Shepherd dog. Results showed that more children conceptualized the live dog, as compared to AIBO, as having physical essences, mental states, sociality, and moral standing. Based on behavioral analyses, children also spent more time touching and within arms distance of the live dog, as compared to AIBO. That said, a surprising majority of children conceptualized and interacted with AIBO in ways that were like a live dog. Discussion focuses on two questions. First, is it possible that a new technological genre is emerging in HCI that challenges traditional ontological categories (e.g., between animate and inanimate)? Second, are pervasive interactions with a wide array of “robotic others ” – increasingly sophisticated personified computational artifacts that mimic biological forms and pull psychologically in mental, social, and moral ways – a good thi...
The present paper critically examines a recent recurrent pattern of Western scholarship of importing sets of Japanese ethics in artificial intelligence/data/robot ethics contexts without a deeper examination of their meaning and value.... more
The present paper critically examines a recent recurrent pattern of Western scholarship of importing sets of Japanese ethics in artificial intelligence/data/robot ethics contexts without a deeper examination of their meaning and value. The paper’s outline is unfolded as such: (1) We draw on material stemming from an ethnographic participant-observer study that followed a debate between Western and Japanese people confronting the robotic AI pet AIBO. (2) We demarcate how many of the proposed Japanese values are practically relevant to the examination of human-robot interaction and how this feeds into existing questions about privacy and safety, in the context of a global overwhelming AI hype and narrative bias. (3) Finally, we discuss how a long history of Western enthusiasm and occasional misunderstandings of Japanese values comes full circle with the recent trend, and we conclude with a set of open questions that require more dedicated empirical research in order to reach more prop...
Robots perceiving their environment using cameras usually need a good representation of how the camera is aligned to the body and how the camera is rotated relative to the ground. This is especially important for bearing-based distance... more
Robots perceiving their environment using cameras usually need a good representation of how the camera is aligned to the body and how the camera is rotated relative to the ground. This is especially important for bearing-based distance measurements. In this paper we show how to use reference objects to improve vision-based distance measurements to objects of unknown size. Several methods for different kinds of reference objects are introduced. These are objects of known size (like a ball), objects extending over the horizon (like goals and beacons), and objects with known shape on the ground (like field lines). We give a detailed description how to determine the rotation of the robot’s camera relative to the ground, provide an error-estimation for all methods and describe the experiments we performed on an Aibo robot.
This paper presents a project whereby the Sony AIBO robot (ERS-220 model) was programmed to compose original music in real-time through direct interaction with its environment and people. It begins with a brief introduction to robotic... more
This paper presents a project whereby the Sony AIBO robot (ERS-220 model) was programmed to compose original music in real-time through direct interaction with its environment and people. It begins with a brief introduction to robotic applications in the arts and music. Then it introduces the technical issues encountered in realising the project (namely, AIBO’s functionality and musical intelligence) followed by the proposed solutions. It presents AIBO-Max, a new tool that we implemented for programming AIBO combining Max/MSP and R-Code, and the musical composition system that is used in association with AIBO behaviours to generate the music.
