Robot Baby Programmed to Cuddle

July 30, 2008 -- David McGoran cradles his baby in his arms. As he looks down into its big, dark eyes, it turns its head towards him and blinks, looking contented as it curls a bony white finger around his hand.

But the "baby" is not human. And it looks more like the evil Gollum from "The Lord Of The Rings" movies except in a hemp romper suit with cloth ears than a gurgly infant.

Meet Heart Robot, a flexible, plastic puppet with robotic features that has been programmed to react to sound, touch and nearby movements.

Heart Robot, so called because its red "heart" is visible on the left side of its body and beats at different rates, is certainly getting more attention than its menacing-looking counterpart, iC Hexapod, nearby.

The six-legged creature, which looks like a giant mechanical tarantula, flexes its spiny metal limbs as a miniature camera where the spider's head would be scrutinizes the face of a young girl staring at it curiously.

On a television screen next to iC Hexapod, the girl gets a live, robot's eye view of what the machine is seeing, shifting its head in response to her movement and recoiling if she gets too close.

Both Heart Robot and iC Hexapod are "emotibots" -- robots programmed to react to human emotions -- on display this week at the Antenna Gallery at London's Science Museum.

For McGoran and iC Hexapod's inventor, Matt Denton, creating robots that recognize and respond to basic human emotions is a logical step as people's daily lives become increasingly dependent on technology.

"People know about artificial intelligence but the perception is that robots are cold and calculating industrial automatons," said McGoran, who is studying robotics at the University of the West of England.

"But over the last decade, there has been a new field where robots have become the opposite of that."

The reaction to Heart Robot is similar to that of cinema audiences to the star of the new Pixar animated film WALL-E, about a cute, ET-like robot looking for love as it clears up the mess of human civilisation on a deserted Earth.

"We're emotional machines. We can't help it. We forget how easy it is for us to be drawn in," said McGoran, from Vancouver, Canada, whose background is in puppetry and dance.

One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, he predicts, humankind's relationship to machines could be transformed if they are programmed to respond to prompts like vocal tension or facial expressions.

Denton agrees.