Robots with "soul"

What kind of robots does an animator / jazz musician / roboticist make? Playful, reactive, curious ones. Guy Hoffman shows demo film of his family of unusual robots -- including two musical bots that like to jam with humans. (Filmed at TEDxJaffa.)

My job is to design, build and study

robots that communicate with people.

But this story doesn't start with robotics at all,

it starts with animation.

When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.,"

I was amazed by how much emotion

they could put into something

as trivial as a desk lamp.

I mean, look at them -- at the end of this movie,

you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture.

(Laughter)

And I said, I have to learn how to do this.

So I made a really bad career decision.

And that's what my mom was like when I did it.

(Laughter)

I left a very cozy tech job in Israel

at a nice software company and I moved to New York

to study animation.

And there I lived

in a collapsing apartment building
in Harlem with roommates.

I'm not using this phrase metaphorically,

the ceiling actually collapsed one day

in our living room.

Whenever they did those news stories
about building violations in New York,

they would put the report in front of our building.

As kind of like a backdrop
to show how bad things are.

Anyway, during the day I went to school and at night

I would sit and draw frame by frame
of pencil animation.

And I learned two surprising lessons --

one of them was that

when you want to arouse emotions,

it doesn't matter so much how something looks,

it's all in the motion -- it's in the timing

of how the thing moves.

And the second, was something
one of our teachers told us.

He actually did the weasel in Ice Age.

And he said:

"As an animator you are not
a director, you're an actor."

So, if you want to find the
right motion for a character,

don't think about it, go use your body to find it --

stand in front of a mirror, act it out

in front of a camera -- whatever you need.

And then put it back in your character.

A year later I found myself at MIT

in the robotic life group, it was one of the first groups

researching the relationships
between humans and robots.

And I still had this dream to make

an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp.

But I found that robots didn't move at all

in this engaging way that I was used to

for my animation studies.

Instead, they were all --

how should I put it, they were all kind of robotic.

(Laughter)

And I thought, what if I took whatever
I learned in animation school,

and used that to design my robotic desk lamp.

So I went and designed frame by frame

to try to make this robot

as graceful and engaging as possible.

And here when you see the robot interacting with me

on a desktop.

And I'm actually redesigning the robot so,

unbeknownst to itself,

it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me.

(Laughter)

I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure

giving me light,

and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice

that's always there when you need
it and doesn't really interfere.

And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery

that I can't find,

in a subtle way, it will show me where the battery is.

So you can see my confusion here.

I'm not an actor.

And I want you to notice how the same

mechanical structure can at one point,

just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring --

and in the other case, seem
violent and confrontational.

And it's the same structure,
just the motion is different.

Actor: "You want to know something?
Well, you want to know something?

He was already dead!

Just laying there, eyes glazed over!"

(Laughter)

But, moving in graceful ways is just one
building block of this whole structure

called human-robot interaction.

I was at the time doing my Ph.D.,

I was working on human robot teamwork;

teams of humans and robots working together.

I was studying the engineering,

the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork.

And at the same time I found myself

in my own kind of teamwork situation

with a good friend of mine who is actually here.

And in that situation we can easily imagine robots

in the near future being there with us.

It was after a Passover seder.

We were folding up a lot of folding chairs,

and I was amazed at how quickly
we found our own rhythm.

Everybody did their own part.

We didn't have to divide our tasks.

We didn't have to communicate verbally about this.

It all just happened.

And I thought,

humans and robots don't look at all like this.

When humans and robots interact,

it's much more like a chess game.

The human does a thing,

the robot analyzes whatever the human did,

then the robot decides what to do next,

plans it and does it.

And then the human waits, until it's their turn again.

So, it's much more like a chess game

and that makes sense because chess is great

for mathematicians and computer scientists.

It's all about information analysis,

decision making and planning.

But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player,

and more like a doer

that just clicks and works together.

So I made my second horrible career choice:

I decided to study acting for a semester.

I took off from a Ph.D. I went to acting classes.

I actually participated in a play,

I hope theres no video of that around still.

And I got every book I could find about acting,

including one from the 19th century

that I got from the library.

And I was really amazed because my
name was the second name on the list --

the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter)

And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years

to be rediscovered for robotics.

And this book shows actors

how to move every muscle in the body

to match every kind of emotion
that they want to express.

But the real relevation was

when I learned about method acting.

It became very popular in the 20th century.

And method acting said, you don't have
to plan every muscle in your body.

Instead you have to use your body
to find the right movement.

You have to use your sense memory

to reconstruct the emotions and kind of

think with your body to find the right expression.

Improvise, play off yor scene partner.

And this came at the same time
as I was reading about this trend

in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition.

Which also talks about the same ideas --

We use our bodies to think,

we don't just think with our brains
and use our bodies to move.

but our bodies feed back into our brain

to generate the way that we behave.

And it was like a lightning bolt.

I went back to my office.

I wrote this paper -- which I never really published

called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence."

And I even took another month

to do what was then the first theater play

with a human and a robot acting together.

That's what you saw before with the actors.

And I thought:

How can we make an artificial intelligence model --

computer, computational model --

that will model some of these ideas of improvisation,

of taking risks, of taking chances,

even of making mistakes.

Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates.

So I worked for quite a long time on these models

and I implemented them on a number of robots.

Here you can see a very early example

with the robots trying to use this
embodied artificial intelligence,

to try to match my movements
as closely as possible,

sort of like a game.

Let's look at it.

You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled.

And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do

when they try to mirror each other

to find the right synchrony between them.

And then, I did another experiment,

and I got people off the street
to use the robotic desk lamp,

and try out this idea of embodied
artificial intelligence.

So, I actually used two kinds
of brains for the same robot.

The robot is the same lamp that you saw,

and I put in it two brains.

For one half of the people,

I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional,

calculated robotic brain.

It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans.

Let's call it the calculated brain.

The other got more the stage actor, risk taker brain.

Let's call it the adventurous brain.

It sometimes acts without knowing
everything it has to know.

It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them.

And I had them do this very tedious task

that took almost 20 minutes

and they had to work together.

Somehow simulating like a factory job

of repetitively doing the same thing.

And what I found was that people actually loved

the adventurous robot.

And they thought it was more intelligent,

more committed, a better member of the team,

contributed to the success of the team more.

They even called it 'he' and 'she,'

whereas people with the calculated brain called it 'it.'

And nobody ever called it 'he' or 'she'.

When they talked about it after the task

with the adventurous brain,

they said, "By the end, we were good
friends and high-fived mentally."

Whatever that means.

(Laughter) Sounds painful.

Whereas the people with the calculated brain

said it was just like a lazy apprentice.

It only did what it was supposed
to do and nothing more.

Which is almost what people expect robots to do,

so I was surprised that people
had higher expectations

of robots, than what anybody in robotics
thought robots should be doing.

And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time --

just like method acting changed the way

people thought about acting in the 19th century,

from going from the very calculated,

planned way of behaving,

to a more intuitive, risk-taking,
embodied way of behaving.

Maybe it's time for robots

to have the same kind of revolution.

A few years later,

I was at my next research job
at Georgia Tech in Atlanta,

and I was working in a group

dealing with robotic musicians.

And I thought, music, that's the perfect place

to look at teamwork, coordination,

timing, improvisation --

and we just got this robot playing marimba.

Marimba, for everybody who was like me,

it was this huge, wooden xylophone.

And, when I was looking at this,

I looked at other works in
human-robot improvisation --

yes, there are other works in
human-robot improvisation --

and they were also a little bit like a chess game.

The human would play,

the robot would analyze what was played,

would improvise their own part.

So, this is what musicians called

a call and response interaction,

and it also fits very well, robots
and artificial intelligence.

But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used

in the theater play and in the teamwork studies,

maybe I can make the robots jam together

like a band.

Everybody's riffing off each other,
nobody is stopping it for a moment.

And so, I tried to do the same
things, this time with music,

where the robot doesn't really know

what it's about to play.

It just sort of moves its body

and uses opportunities to play,

And does what my jazz teacher
when I was 17 taught me.

She said, when you improvise,

sometimes you don't know what you're doing

and you're still doing it.

And so I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually

know what it's doing, but it's still doing it.

So let's look at a few seconds
from this performance.

Where the robot listens to the human musician

and improvises.

And then, look at how the human musician also

responds to what the robot is doing, and picking up

from its behavior.

And at some point can even be surprised
by what the robot came up with.

(Music)

(Applause)

Being a musician is not just about making notes,

otherwise nobody would every go see a live show.

Musicians also communicate with their bodies,

with other band members, with the audience,

they use their bodies to express the music.

And I thought, we already have
a robot musician on stage,

why not make it be a full-fledged musician.

And I started designing a socially expressive head

for the robot.

The head does't actually touch the marimba,

it just expresses what the music is like.

These are some napkin sketches
from a bar in Atlanta,

that was dangerously located exactly halfway

between my lab and my home. (Laughter)

So I spent, I would say on average,

three to four hours a day there.

I think. (Laughter)

And I went back to my animation
tools and tried to figure out

not just what a robotic musician would look like,

but especially what a robotic
musician would move like.

To sort of show that it doesn't like
what the other person is playing --

and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling

at the moment.

So we ended up actually getting the money
to build this robot, which was nice.

I'm going to show you now the
same kind of performance,

this time with a socially expressive head.

And notice one thing --

how the robot is really showing us

the beat it's picking up from the human.

We're also giving the human a sense
that the robot knows what it's doing.

And also how it changes the way it moves

as soon as it starts its own solo.

(Music)

Now it's looking at me to make sure I'm listening.

(Music)

And now look at the final chord of the piece again,

and this time the robot communicates with its body

when it's busy doing its own thing.

And when it's ready

to coordinate the final chord with me.

(Music)

(Applause)

Thanks. I hope you see how much this totally not --

how much this part of the body
that doesn't touch the instrument

actually helps with the musical performance.

And at some point, we are in Atlanta,
so obviously some rapper

will come into our lab at some point.

And we had this rapper come in

and do a little jam with the robot.

And here you can see the robot

basically responding to the beat and --

notice two things. One, how irresistible it is

to join the robot while it's moving its head.

and you kind of want to move
your own head when it does it.

And second, even though the rapper
is really focused on his iPhone,

as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back.

So even though it's just in
the periphery of his vision --

it's just in the corner of his eye --
it's very powerful.

And the reason is that we can't ignore

physical things moving in our environment.

We are wired for that.

So, if you have a problem with maybe your partners

looking at the iPhone too much
or their smartphone too much,

you might want to have a robot there

to get their attention. (Laughter)

(Music)

(Applause)

Just to introduce the last robot

that we've worked on,

that came out of something kind
of surprising that we found:

At some point people didn't care anymore
about the robot being so intelligent,

and can improvise and listen,

and do all these embodied intelligence
things that I spent years on developing.

They really liked that the robot was
enjoying the music. (Laughter)

And they didn't say that the
robot was moving to the music,

they said that the robot was enjoying the music.

And we thought, why don't we take this idea,

and I designed a new piece of furniture.

This time it wasn't a desk
lamp; it was a speaker dock.

It was one of those things you
plug your smartphone in.

And I thought, what would happen

if your speaker dock didn't
just play the music for you,

but it would actually enjoy it too. (Laughter)

And so again, here are some animation tests

from an early stage. (Laughter)

And this is what the final product looked like.

("Drop It Like It's Hot")

So, a lot of bobbing head.

(Applause)

A lot of bobbing heads in the audience,

so we can still see robots influence people.

And it's not just fun and games.

I think one of the reasons I care so much

about robots that use their body to communicate

and use their body to move --

and I'm going to let you in on a little
secret we roboticists are hiding --

is that every one of you is
going to be living with a robot

at some point in their life.

Somewhere in your future there's
going to be a robot in your life.

And if not in yours, then in your children's lives.

And I want these robots to be --

to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful

than currently they seem to be.

And for that I think that maybe robots

need to be less like chess players

and more like stage actors and more like musicians.

Maybe they should be able to
take chances and improvise.

And maybe they should be able to
anticipate what you're about to do.

And maybe they need to be able to make mistakes

and correct them,

because in the end we are human.

And maybe as humans, robots
that are a little less than perfect

are just perfect for us.

Thank you.

(Applause)