Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
When you think of breakthroughs in the field of robotics research, you can’t help but assume that nearly all of the work is being done in Japan. After all, it is a country that sent a pint-sized robot to the International Space Station, developed one capable of reading people’s emotions and even constructed a robot specifically designed to help aspiring dentists practice their craft.
Likewise, it has historically been a field dominated by males. According to BBC News, women are estimated to represent no more than one-fifth of the robotics researchers in the world – which is what makes Mari Velonaki such a trailblazer.
BBC News called Velonaki “a leader in the new and rapidly growing field of social robotics, the creation of robots for everyday use,” a field which reportedly accounts for 80 percent of growth in the industry since 2005. Velonaki, who has a background as an artist, has “thrown open” the doors of “the once male-only world of robotics,” the British media outlet added.
She is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, as well as director and founder of the Creative Robotics Lab (CRL), a cross-disciplinary research institute which examines human interactions with three-dimensional robotic agents, and co-director of the Centre for Social Robotics, which studies robots in places like hospitals and airports.
Velonaki’s bio indicates that she has worked as an artist and a researcher in the field of interactive installation art since 1995. She first expanded her work into the robotics in 2003, when she launched and led the work on the Australian Research Council art/science research project “Fish-Bird: Autonomous Interactions in a Contemporary Arts Setting.”
In October of this year, she and her CRL colleagues, along with experts from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, presented research which found that Australians placed more trust in robots than their Japanese counterparts.
“Our research aimed to measure and compare human trust, perception and attitudes towards an android robot in two different countries,” Professor Velonaki, who was voted one of the world’s top 25 women to watch in the field of robotics in 2014 by Robohub, said at the time.
The researchers recruited 111 people from Sydney and Tokyo and asked each of them to interact with a Geminoid-F android robot with the appearance of a young Japanese female. The android asked each individual to perform a pair of different tasks, and the study revealed that Australian participants were more open to interacting with the robot than those from Japan.
Despite her success in the field, Velonaki told BBC News that she was “the only woman” for a period of several years. “I didn’t have any female students,” the professor explained. “It’s great to have men and women. We have different things to offer… [women ask] different questions.”
Veolanki, 45, said that she moved from Switzerland to Australia two decades ago, where she completed a Ph. D. program in interface design and post-doctoral work at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. She said that it was her relationship with her older cousin, a multiple sclerosis patient who had to use a wheelchair, that inspired her work on the Fish-Bird instillation.
Fish-Bird uses two wheelchairs, each of which are “programmed to respond to the behavior of people who come to view the art work,” the BBC said, “and to offer words of wisdom, often in the form of poetry, in short notes that pop out of a small printer built into each wheelchair.”
She has also toured galleries and museums with a petite porcelain-like humanoid female known as Diamandini, a five-foot tall robot modeled after a young adult female that also interacts with people.
“Diamandini has contributed to the scientific understanding of how the environment robots inhabit dictates how people respond to them, she says,” according to the BBC News report. “It is all in keeping with her driving philosophy that technology should be designed for people, not designed for the sake of technology.”
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
Comments