Two trash cans on wheels have been roaming around Downtown Brooklyn’s Albee Square in the early afternoon for the last two weeks, going up to people as they finish their lunch to collect trash. And while they may be pretty good at it, collecting people’s trash isn’t their ultimate purpose.
The “trash bots” are part of a Cornell Tech study to better understand how humans interact with robots in public spaces. Essentially deploying trash bins on remote-controlled hoverboards equipped with a 360-degree camera, the project hopes to explore how people think about robots and what already established mental models they use to interact with them — asking whether they treat them like waiters, pets, kids or something else.
“Why does that trashcan have a camera on it?” asked one concerned passerby.
The research team hopes to tour the robots through all five boroughs to see the differences in how people interact with them.
“And all of this can go into basically the design of future robots,” said Frank Bu, the PhD student leading the study. In Albee Square on Wednesday afternoon, people eating lunch or passing through like Keisha Trappier, seemed amused.
“I think it’s cute, you know? I know it’s needed because there’s always trash,” Trappier said. “I enjoyed it. I was just wondering like, does it really sense me, does it know that I’m by it? So that’s why I put my water thing in front of it to see like, and you know, it’s on point, it moved and stuff.”
While the robots are designed to study how people interact with autonomous everyday robots, in fact, they are remote-controlled by members of Bu’s team sitting at one of the tables in the plaza.
Trappier said she appreciated the idea of an automated object helping to keep the area litter-free, but that’s as far as her affinity for robots goes.
“Robot garbage? Yeah, like that is okay. Robot people? No. So if that’s what they are trying to go at, no. We still need people out here to handle certain…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply