Embodied and Situated: Robots with Feelings

Robots are on the rise. We’ve all seen them in movies and TV shows, but they’re becoming increasingly common in real life too. They vacuum our floors, build our cars, and even teach us how to dance. But there’s one thing they can’t do (yet): feel emotions like we do.

Sure, they can exhibit basic behaviors that might approximate certain emotional states – a wagging tail when happy, for example – but these are just pre-programmed responses with no underlyingprocessing of feeling going on. In order to create truly emotive robots, we need to endow them with what cognitive scientists call “embodied cognition”: the ability to understand the world through their own bodies and physical interactions with it. Only then will be ableto design machines that experience the full range of human emotions . . .

One approach that is gaining popularity is known as “situated robotics”: the idea that robots need to be placed in realistic environments before they can truly understand what’s going on around them. The motivation here is similar to why infants and young children learn best through play: by physically exploring their surroundings, they gain a contextual understanding of objects and how they can be used (e.g., a block isn’t just for stacking – it can also be thrown, rolled, etc.).

This hands-on learning style has been shown to work well for robots too. In one study , researchers equipped a robot with tactile sensors and tasked it with building towers out of blocks . At first the robot was very clumsy, frequently dropping or misplacing blocks. But over time it got better at handling them, eventually becoming quite adept at tower-building! Importantly though, this improvement didn’t come from additional programming; rather ,it came about through physical trial-and -error experience within its environment . The authors suggest that situated robotics may provide a key ingredient for creating emotionally intelligent machines : the ability to interact bodily with other agents and learn from those interactions using basic reinforcement mechanisms .

In other words, in order for robots to feel emotions, we need to give them bodies . And not just any old body – they need ones that allow them to interact physically with the world around them. Only then will be ableto create machines that are truly emotive and sensitive to our own feelings.