When I look for news stories, I come across a ton of robots in all sorts of forms. Roboticists have modeled automatons on virtually every living creature—from ants, water striders and fish to snakes, dogs, baby seals and people. These are some of the prototypes or commercial products that turned out to be unsettling, either because they mimic more disturbing biological traits or because they drop into the “Uncanny Valley,” an oft-quoted (but unproven) hypothesis that if a robot is too human-like, it will inspire disgust and repulsion instead of empathy.
1-BigDog: A headless, mechanical gigantic canine with an ominous whirling sound and odd, prancing legs, the Army’s BigDog is a soldier’s new best friend. Able to tromp up and down hills, across ice and through snow or sand, BigDog can carry heavy payloads, letting soldiers stay nimble on their feet. A just-released video on BigDog is available at my Tech Review post, “A Soldier’s (Robotic) Best Friend.” See an older video of BigDog recover from a violent kick to the gut below:
Not something you’d want to run into in the woods!
2-SnakeBots: Professor Howie Choset at Carnegie Mellon University has developed long, cylinder snakes for heart surgery and the battlefield. The snakebot slips in through a cut in the chest and wriggles around in the torso to perform basic heart surgeries.
A version of it also attaches to a stretcher to perform automated tests, for example, on a wounded soldier.Though they could make surgery less invasive and help soldiers on the field, I think I’d feel a whole lot worse on the operating table if I saw one slither toward me.
3-iCub: Researchers of the RobotCub Consortium in Europe created a child-sized robot, part of a large project to understand the evolution of cognition. In this 2009 video it gracefully does calisthenics, a little too gracefully, if you ask me. Something about the dull mechanical gleam in its eye at the end of this video gives me chills.
4-Nexi: Another child-like automaton and made by MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal, Nexi can show a range of emotions, as demonstrated by this April 2008 video. Her ‘angry’ face is scarier than a scifi killer cyborg’s! (At least her voice is soothing.)
5-Roboticist David Hanson delves deep into the Valley, creating lifelike robotic faces of scifi writer Philip K. Dick and an emotionally expressive recently updated edition of an Albert Einstein automaton.
yes– the icub is deeply unsettling.