“New Yorkers don’t have a reputation for being the friendliest and friendliest, so the researchers were pleasantly surprised to see that a very marginal number of residents were unfriendly to the garbage robots put in place in Greenwich Village”, writes the site Futurism. Researchers at Cornell University in New York state conducted an experiment to test the interactions between humans and robots, and more specifically mobile trash cans.
For the needs of their study, Astor Place, in the heart of New York, was the playground of two bins – one for ordinary waste, the second for recyclable packaging – mounted on wheels and equipped with a camera. They were both remote controlled by two research assistants present on site. The area has many chairs and benches, where passers-by sit down to enjoy a coffee or a sandwich. The end goal was to “better understand all the behaviors and reactions that robots will have to manage autonomously over the long term”.
Scientists obviously expected hostile reactions. If certain unimaginative passers-by have addressed “fingers of honor” on camera and voluntarily knocked the robot over, most of them ended up being particularly benevolent, laughs the site specializing in new technologies.
In this video uploaded by Fanjun Bu, one of the researchers involved in the experiment, we can see passers-by facilitating the work of the bins, removing obstacles in their path, taking care to place their waste in the bin adequate, even giving marks of affection. One little girl even kisses the camera. “Overall, we could have expected much worse,” écrit Futurism.
The study used the “Wizard of Oz technique” relating to the field of robotics, that is to say the replacement of a human being by a computer tool. “In this study, people were generally courteous to robots, and the few morons who behaved inappropriately were, as is the case with the general population of New York, simple unpleasant exceptions”, concludes the title.
