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"Tweenbots" Test NYC Pedestrian-Robot Relations
MBCook recommends Kacie Kinzer's tweenbots page, which documents some of her experiments with small, anthropomorphized robots that need help. Kinzer is writing a thesis (at the Center for the Recently Possible) centered around investigating whether people in New York City will help a cute little robot to get where it's going. "Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal."
Griefers will love this toy.
damn bots!
...that the bomb squad didn't show up?
np: Radiohead - Polyethylene (Parts 1 & 2) (Airbag / How Am I Driving?)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Constantly text messaging other tweenbots.
That's what I think of when I hear tweenbot
Please put me back in the water.
Why do new comments on stories go to the bottom of the list?
Because your preferences are set that way. It's the default for new accounts and cowards such as yourself. Create an account and set it to display as you like.
I wonder what would happen if he had a frowny face? Or changing the wording on the flag to be less helpless or even rude?
I've always wondered if I took a postcard, wrote someone's name and city to be delivered to, and gave it to a random person. Would it ever get there? I'm going to try it tonight.
I can't imagine this being entirely safe. What if someone points it where it rolls out into the middle of a busy intersection, and somebody slams on their brakes or swerves to avoid it, causing an accident or hitting a pedestrian?
You are now manually breathing.
In New York (some 20 years ago) I was surprised by how nice and helpful the people are in the street. If I just pulled out a map to have a look at it, people would stop and ask if they could help me.
I doubt these robots would survive and reach their destinations in Paris, for example. But it would be interesting to try. I may be wrong.
(I live neither in Paris nor in NY, and am neither French nor American)
Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the âoerightâ direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation.
I'd have lost that bet. Maybe I'm too cynical.
But the one example they showed was entirely within a city park. I can't imagine this working in the city, the odds of it getting ran over would have to approach 1:1 most other places.
I wonder if the sidewalk it was traveling down (to the south) had a physical barrier blocking it from going further south? (toward traffic) In that respect I would expect the locations were carefully chosen to minimize risk.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Won't people steal this? I would if I saw a cute little robot on the street!
Step 3: Record results and post on YouTube...
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
I expected to see at least one dog "marking" it and possibly a cat trying to catch that flag.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
Who read "tweenbots" in the title and thought it was some new type of botnet which infected kids toy pre-school computers or some web 2.0 corporate invented term for a botnet created by a tweeny-scripter? Here I thought Windows was bad enough that kids can cause havok, now the starting age has dropped even further? All I heard was 19 by Paul Hardcastle with altered lyrics:
"In 1999 the average age of a Windows hacker was 19, in 2009 it's 9."
...if you put a squeegee and a tin can in its claw?
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
No one ran up and gave it a big kick!
Before the first bot was mugged.
You misunderstand: The robot is a women -- It's asking for directions.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
1. Make a sad-faced robot carrying a coin jar.
2. Give it a sign saying "Brother, can you spare a quarter so I can buy a new battery?"
3. ???
4. PROFIT!
There may be a gender difference issue here but it doesn't suggest that one gender is more superior than the other at computer science. Using crowdsourcing is a perfectly legitimate trick and using a social solution might indeed be more stereotypically feminine. The author didn't claim to be doing groundbreaking computer science work, merely having fun. Moreover, her solution works. The stereotypical male solution you mention would likely not be able to successfully get from one location to another the way the tweenbots do. So by standards of success, her solution worked. Don't forget that.
I take the opposite point of view. Don't you find it difficult to read the comments of a thread in the opposite order they were posted? Discussions become meaningless.
tweenbot would've look like this to them
http://i40.tinypic.com/335cc4k.jpg
I don't think anyone is suggesting one gender is more superior at computer science, they're suggesting that one gender is more superior at asking for directions.
I would expect them to all get stolen in 60 seconds.
this robot is going to get stolen on the first day LOL.
Getting a Ph.D. in anything requires a significant contribution to the state of the art in a particular field. Without reading the article, I'm not entirely sure what that field is, but expecting something very hard or very high impact is perfectly reasonable for a Ph.D.
Men in computer science: robot vision, algorithms to avoid terrain and navigate obstacles, logic, highly advanced everything, etc.
Women in sociology: puts a smiley face on a box on wheels that only goes straight and calls it a social experiment.
Fixed that for you.
Your chauvinism is the one who wanted to label it computer science, not her.
I think you are a crazy person ;)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
It's quite possible that the primary reason most of those people stopped to aid it was because of their fascination and the uniqueness of it. Had it not been something that stood out dramatically from the expected, I suspect it would have received little attention and even less help.
It likely demonstrates very little of a social nature at all.
What you're missing is that it isn't a computer science or robotics project.
any number of software releases. Thrown to the publics' mercy, unready for the real world, totally dependent on someone else's goodwill to succeed.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
ITP is a two-year graduate program located in the Tisch School of the Arts whose mission is to explore the imaginative use of communications technologies...
From what I've seen on her website, and her school's site, I'd describe her as an art student focusing on communication technology. This is definitely an experiment in communication, and it's definitely got an "artsy" angle to it. She certainly isn't claiming to be a computer scientist.
A little more digging on the Tisch website indicates that she's a Masters student. Having seen a number of "digital arts" masters and doctoral projects, I'd say this is pretty normal for a masters thesis. Hard or high impact? Probably not -- but it is neat, and she is putting a lot of work into it.
Are you kidding me? Kick the little frakker into the bushes. DO NOT help 'bots destroy humanity. Every person who thinks it's a good idea to help speed our inevitable destruction is a sympathizer.
I am Tween-3P0 Pedestrian-Robot Relations, and this is my counterpart Tween-2D2
I would help them if that was the case
I predict a new term will raise to popularity from this: eRoadKill
Table-ized A.I.
1. Adorable cardboard box.
2. ???
3. ???
4. Arnold.
4chan loves kittens. NYC may display helpful benevolence towards these little dudes, that shouldn't be taken to mean anything other than that as a whole NYC has a soft spot for cute small robots.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Men in computer science: robot vision, algorithms to avoid terrain and navigate obstacles, logic, highly advanced everything, etc.
Women in computer science: Doing the exact same thing.
Seriously, that's the kind of coding I'm doing/working with for a robotics project that requires all that stuff. (Though a lot of it has already been implemented in libraries like OpenCV and player and reinventing the wheel is kind of stupid, but yeah.)
This girl didn't need it for her (very cool social experiment) project, so she didn't go near it. Yeah, she worked with robots, but not in a comp sci/AI way. I don't see the flaw; would you tell a web programmer to write a web cam driver 'cause his website can handle streaming video?
open source modern art: laser taggi
I generally hope that no tweenbot perishes, for the sake of mankind. I met an older guy from Japan who told me about this R&D facility where he worked, and he said he once left the facility to go to the manufacturing site. He went into a warehouse full of robots, all standing there, just like in the Will Smith iRobot movie. I asked him why they had made so many robots. He didn't know. He said his company just did that. It's research, not business, at this phase.
If this college student decides to make 100 of these robots, and distributes them across Washington Park, I think that would be the real experiment. One is small and helpless. 1000? 10,000? One is an experiment. One hundred is a project. Ten thousand is an invasion. I hope this student gets herself an A+. At a minimum, she's got some site traffic records!
New Yorkers, in my opinion, tend to be some of the most gracious and sympathetic city-dwellers I know of. Of course, traditions and dispositions tend to vary tremendously from borough to borough. I've been living in the south for the past few years, and have found "Southern Hospitality" to be largely a myth, apart from the initial friendly facade that people tend to put on -- at the very least, the northeast doesn't deserve the rap it gets from the rest of the country.
I agree, agree, agree!
It's not just the South, though; it's also the Midwest. It seems that the South and the Midwest have a very ill-deserved reputation as being hospitable places. They aren't.
I grew up in the Northeast (NY, PA) and truly, the level of "friendliness" compared to central VA, Iowa, Dakotas, and so on... it's off the charts.
Like you said, the initial friendliness is there, but just don't stay there if you're not originally from there. You will be an Outsider (even in a more urban area), because you did not grow up there, and you've got an ever-so-slightly-different cultural and social background. You will not fit in, and instead of being open and accepting, you are shunned and looked down on - behind your back.
In the NE, people will (more often than not) let you know if they have a problem with you or your behavior. Rude? Maybe. But it beats the hell out of said person sharing their negative opinion about you with their neighbors, friends, etc. and it finally getting back to you months later. (Try this one on: finding out from a coworker, in a town of 200k who lives on the opposite side of the city from you, that your next-door neighbor is pissed at you.)
The one exception I've found is that night people in the Midwest are more friendly than pretty much everyone. That is, people who are bored with their jobs, at night: gas station attendants and the like. They'll sit for a chat, if they have the time, and are very disarmed. Though, I suspect this largely has to do with crime rates.
If you're not in a bigger town, good luck
It's kind of ironic that I will, on occasion, run into someone and chat with them for hours about anything and everything, having a grand old time. It's only at the end of the conversation that I inquire about where they're from. Almost invariably, they were in the military (moved around a lot), and/or grew up in NY, MA, PA, or another of the larger NE states. (And no, the accent isn't usually a tell: it makes a lot of sense to lose a NE accent out here, quickly, as it's yet another thing that makes you stand out in a bad way.)
In small towns, it's even more pronounced - to the point of open hostility. For instance, if you're driving through a small town and stop for gas, you will sometimes get an overtly hostile attitude. Not always the case, but more often than not, it's very much a "wtf are you doing here, interfering with me and my boys sitting around doing nothing?"
The one place I've visited where "friendly Midwesterners" might apply as I've noticed it applying in NY is is Texas (San Antonio). It's just too bad NY politicians have made it so difficult to make a living in NY of late.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
4chan loves kittens, but also has zippo the cat. Isn't this a very good approximation of what will happen to the little robot?
Skynet noticed this and developed the Cameron model to look cute instead of scary. (Similarly Dick's "Second Variety".)
However, as this process continues -- assuming both sides survive -- the newer models start liking the *human* environment more and more, because that's what they've evolved for. Eventually their loyalties become compromised. Human loyalties too.
The same process happens with human infections. Syphilis arrived in Europe as a ghastly fast-burning killer like E-Bola. Within a few centuries it has adapted to having only a marginal effect on human reproduction. A few centuries from now, assuming it hasn't been eliminated or filtered out on upload or whatever, syphilis will be just another of the thousands of nondescript bugs which live on peaceably in humans which we pay no attention to.
These little guys would be totally fucked in Cairo.
If you don't know what you're doing, you can't make mistakes.
I would love to see what would happen if he didn't draw a smiley face. If he drew a grumpy or mean face on the robot, would people direct it into traffic?
The stereotypical male solution you mention would likely not be able to successfully get from one location to another the way the tweenbots do. So by standards of success, her solution worked. Don't forget that.
Well, crap, I'm sorry. Why should we ever try to innovate anything when humans can do it just fine anyway? I really don't get this attitude. Why shouldn't we just be subsistence farmers, then? After all, the stereotypical male solution of establishing technology and building a society would not likely be able to free people from work, so why even bother?
I don't see any value in what Kinzer has done here, and I don't understand why you think her approach is a valid solution to robot navigation. How is that going to get us self-driving cars? Humans can drive cars perfectly fine, never mind all the death and injury, so why should we even bother, right? How is this going to get us robots that can explore Mars or anywhere else in the solar system? Are we going to have to get humans there first so they can guide the suckers along?
Sorry, dude. The stereotypical male solution is to move forward and progress science and technology. All I see in your post is support of my initial attitude that females are wholly incapable of doing that:
Using crowdsourcing is a perfectly legitimate trick and using a social solution might indeed be more stereotypically feminine.
Additionally, why don't all the females who think that knowing Word makes them computer experts and all of those who think Kinzer is an innovator in robotics go realize that females are perfectly capable of advancing technology. One of my personal heroes is Ada Augusta.
I guess Ada was one of few women who actually gave a crap about doing something that didn't involve, "Look at me, I'm a woman, I'm cute as a button." Or "All you men are stupid, we can do things just fine without all that hard thinking. I don't like thinking." Give me a break.
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First, Kinzer is doing this as an art project, not a robotics project as you would know if you read TFA. In any event, it is a legitimate solution in so far as reCAPTCHA is a solution to imperfect OCR. The comparison to subsistence farming isn't good. The key isn't that we solve something a certain way but that we get a solution to a problem. reCAPTCHA thus is a good solution.
Moreover, we are talking about stereotypes. Indeed the poster I was replying to was explicitly thinking in such terms. Obviously there are very good female computer scientists but do discuss this issue as anything more than an analysis of stereotypical behavior becomes pretty stupid given that this is an art project not a comp sci project and given that stereotypes are very often wrong anyways.
Swap boxes are a type of interactive street art that started up here in Ottawa. They also depend on anonymous public maintenance (namely, in the form of "take somethin', leave somethin'") to keep them alive.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Adding a note to my previous comment:
I happened to notice a story in the London Independent today which refers to this process, whereby antagonists evolve to live together:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/new-bird-flu-cases-suggest-the-danger-of-pandemic-is-rising-1667526.html/
I see these all the time. They're called "tourists."
Here's a video where a ferret hijacks a Tweenbot and rides it to freedom:
http://ferretbunny.com/?p=778
I, for one, welcome our new Tweenbot overlords.