RESEARCH General Education

COLLABORATION
Exploration of robots with emotions part of interdisciplinary series

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

11/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — What if the next Robbie the Robot is wired with human feelings? What if an advanced cousin of R2D2 finds himself falling in love? How would kinder-gentler cyborgs express their emotions and affections? How would that situation, in turn, affect human relationships?

Such musings may seem far-fetched, a waste of early 21st century time.

But there are "roboticists" all over the world who not only have considered such technological possibilities, but also are working to develop them in the lab.

Peter Asaro, a young graduate student, has picked the brains of many such roboticists and recorded their words and deeds in a feature documentary titled "Love Machine."

Asaro, who himself is working on "biomorphic robots" at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present the premiere of his documentary at 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, 405 N. Mathews, Urbana. The event will be free and open to the public.

His video – and a panel discussion to follow it – are part of a three-semester exploration of the interplay among the arts, humanities, sciences and technology called "Silicon, Carbon, Culture: Combining Codes Through the Arts, Humanities and Technology." The SCC program, a joint venture of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the College of Fine and Applied Arts, is supporting 16 collaborative projects, including performances, exhibitions, speaker series, conferences, virtual reality projects and innovative demonstrations.

According to Asaro, the independent and self-funded digital video, made with Doug Matejka, a former graduate student in social work at Illinois, "considers the social and moral implications of building humanoid robots sophisticated enough to participate in social and emotional roles that are traditionally considered exclusively or even essentially human: friendship, sex and love."

The 110-minute video "examines the actual technologies being developed in these directions and discusses these issues with the people who are pursuing these technologies," Asaro said. "It also brings in various social critics, commentators and philosophers of various perspectives to examine what implications this might have for human relationships."

The video also features footage of many cutting-edge humanoid and industrial robots, as well as music by the New York band Blonde Redhead and original music by Champaign-Urbana musicians.

Asaro is working on concurrent doctorates in philosophy and computer science. For his work at Iguana Robotics in the technology commercialization lab at Illinois, he is "taking computational models of various neural mechanisms and trying to replicate them in robotic systems."

Asaro’s premiere is co-sponsored by the philosophy department, the Science, Technology and Society Workshop and Beckman Institute’s Integrated Systems Laboratory.