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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.
...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.
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!
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
Before the first bot was mugged.
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!
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.
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 ?
I predict a new term will raise to popularity from this: eRoadKill
Table-ized A.I.
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
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
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?