Robot videojournalist uses cuteness to get vox pops

Imagine a cardboard version of Pixar's Wall-e character, but with added ?ber-cute human voice, and you've got a fair picture of Boxie, Alexander Reben's documentary-video-making robot.

Designed to wander the streets shooting video, the diminutive droid trundles up to people and asks them to tell it an interesting story.

Sounds crazy? Surprisingly, not entirely: a good few people did actually cooperate with Boxie ? enough to make a short movie ? though one malcontent dumped the robot in a trash can and a child tried to kidnap it.

"The idea was to create a robot that was interesting enough for people to engage with it and offer to help it, carrying it around and up and down stairs to show it things," says Reben, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.

To win cooperation from the person in the street, cuteness is Boxie's stock-in-trade. In addition to being a squat, doe-eyed creature, it is also made of cardboard, a material Reben says people perceive as non-threatening, even friendly. When his team tried to build Boxie from white plastic, it looked scarily skull-like.

Nice doggie

Based on an off-the-shelf caterpillar-tracked chassis, the robot ? presented at the ACM Multimedia Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, in late November ? uses ultrasound sonar to detect walls. That keeps it straight and true while it trundles along sidewalks and corridors, and a body-heat sensor tells it when it's found a person ? though a large dog could fool it, Reben concedes.

It then sets to work with its not-very-hard-nosed interview technique. "Boxie has a script in which it asks people questions and asks them to pick it up and show it around an area like a lab or mall. To move on to the next series of questions, people are asked to press buttons on either side of it," says Reben.

Boxie would set off on its own at the beginning of the day and it would generally spend 6?hours or so collecting video ? limited more by the video recording time available than battery power. It would report its condition to the research team regularly, via whatever open Wi-Fi it could find, but not its position: location-sensing tech was dropped to save development time.

"That meant I'd have to go out and search for Boxie at the end of the day. Once I found it in the trash and another time an intern spotted a child trying to put it in its parents' car," he says.

Over a few days Boxie collected about 50 interviews, which the MIT team has edited down to a 5-minute documentary. Overall, Reben and colleague Joe Paradiso reckon robot-mediated story acquisition works: "A coherent movie was easily produced from the video clips captured, proving that their content and organisation were viable for story-making," they say in their conference paper.

Don't be annoying

Chris Melhuish, director of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK, says MIT was right to focus on perfecting Boxie's social acceptability. "As robots become everyday objects in our environment, the way they behave will become increasingly important. Future smart machines will need such social intelligence to interact naturally ? utilising appropriate gestures, body pose and non-verbal communication, for instance."

However, as any journalist on a vox-pop assignment soon finds out, people can be cranky ? and Boxie took its share of abuse from the public. Force sensors in the robot recorded that it had suffered violent shaking ? or been thrown to the ground ? a number of times. So the researchers have some advice for future builders of robotic reporters: "Try not to be annoying."

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