Robot imitation experiments with children

I have spent much of the last few weeks pondering about the different ways in which I can show children the e-pucks imitating each other. I propose one of three different methods:

(1) Show the imitation video, ask the children what they think is happening and then show them the player stage animation film stating ‘this is what ‘actually’ happened’.

(2) Show the imitation video and the player stage animation film side by side.

(3) Show the imitation video alone.

However, I have concerns with all three methods. With the imitation videos alone, it is very hard to see the patterns (even when I know what I’m looking for!) From past experience, I have learnt that children will most likely give a response to a question regardless of whether they know the answer or not. Therefore will they just provide a response to please me? Conversely, if I show the children the player stage animation films, will I be ‘spoon feeding’ them with responses? Will I be making the patterns too apparent?. In addition, by demonstrating the imitation video next to the player stage animation film the children’s attention may be divided.

Another problem with robot videos is that it may not be as engaging as having embodied robots in front of the children. I suppose one might ask ‘Why don’t you take the robots to the children?’ Unfortunately, it is not a simple process of switching the robots ‘on’ and ‘off’. There are various tracking and logging pieces equipment that is only available at the robot lab.

After having a lengthy conversation with Andy (a fellow team member), he suggested that it may be possible for the robots to leave a ‘trail’ as they did the imitation. The benefit of that method instead of method number 2 (showing player stage animation film and imitation videos simultaneously) is that the children’s attention is less likely to be divided. This still however leaves the question of ‘am I making the patterns too obvious?’ The highlighted drawings (player stage animation) will clearly show that the robots are producing shapes. However, it is questionable as to whether children will associate this with imitation.

Robot interaction seen through the eyes of children

Our project hopes to discern new patterns of behaviour emerging from robot interaction. A concern is that the robot team will be unable to discern new patterns – ‘unable to see the wood for the trees’. Might it be that children are able to see patterns that as the research team we would miss? One of our team members, Sajida Bhamjee, has taken e-pucks into schools and collected data on the children’s reactions to seeming them moving around. The e-pucks were programmed to follow each other by sensing each other’s tail light and following it. Due to variations in the environment, such as light levels, there was some variation in what they actually did. The e-pucks moved quickly and bumped each other. The children talked in interesting ways about what was happening and who was controlling it.

Our next step is to show children the robots imitating each other. It is difficult to set this up outside the robotics lab (not impossible but time consuming and technically challenging), so instead of taking the robots to the children we have filmed the robots. However, when they imitate they move slowly as you can see if you follow this link to the film on You Tube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hygWbKcAaTs

This might not interest children. Would it catch their attention if speeded up? The video is available for down load. Please try viewing the film speeded up.

From the data collected through the tracking equipment in the robot lab, and using ‘Player Stage’ software, the robots as seen in the film can appear as an animation with their tracks as if ‘drawn in the sand’. You can download a video of this. Below is the tracks they drew.

It maybe that the children would enjoy seeing the animation more than the film of the robots. There is also the question of whether the animation should show the 'tracks in the sand' or not.

Open Science and the Artificial Culture Project

From the start of our project, the intention has been to make it open to all who are interested, and to enable this by having an interactive project website and to put our data on the website. The idea of open science was new to me but immediately seemed attractive. Why? Here are some reasons I find persuasive. Open science opens up opportunities for ideas to flow into the project from anyone who is interested. It increases access to the process of doing science to the public and makes us as scientists more directly accountable to the public. It allows others to analyse our data to check our analysis or try new ways of doing the analysis and there is potential for others to discern emergent patterns in the data or maybe the research process, that we as a team do not notice as we are part of the project.

So why have I found it hard to write about the project on our project blog? There are technical reasons such as forgetting the password for signing in and not being online when I have an idea for a blog entry. However, a deeper reason is feeling I do not have anything worth saying – or at least not yet.

My ‘not yet’ includes a whole mixture of assumptions and feelings of which these are a few have clarified through discussion with Ann Grand and Alan Winfield.

The process of doing research is not interesting, only the result, and even then the result should have some obvious implications for the global community and environment.

Actually I don’t believe that. As a sociologist my research includes the study of processes of doing and using science. Science involves a lot of people working away at small parts of a problem, without being sure of the implications of what they are doing. If we knew the results of our research beforehand it would not be research. We can of course suggest why it might be important to investigate a particular aspect of the world, but we cannot know for sure that our research will have impact.

Research is about finding new knowledge so it I need to check something is new before I talk about it.

To be sure of this takes a lot of time as it involves searching the literature and reading everything that is relevant. This approach dominates health sciences and arguably is the appropriate approach in this field of research, which is applied to improving health. However, from working with scientists from other disciplines, I understand that there is not this obsession with searching for all relevant literature. The difference seems to be that in health sciences we are often working from a current understanding of a biological, psychological or social mechanism and then testing whether an intervention, based on this understanding, then makes a difference when used in a population. In biological, and indeed social science, we are more often seeking to understand the mechanism. This demands a different critical approach to what is already known.

But there are also feelings..

So far my reasons for ‘not yet’ are bound up with the research disciplines in which I work – sociology and health sciences. However there are also my feelings. There is the fear that people will judge me negatively and the fear that people will take my ideas and beat me to the credit. These fears seem to be contradictory, suggesting that I feel I am both a terrible scientist and a brilliant scientist. Having contradictory feelings is very normal. However, I think these fears are bound up with the results of research rather than the process. I know it is possible to undertake research that has a rigorous process but does not make a world-changing discovery. I spend time teaching rigorous research processes to students. So, although the feelings are unlikely to go away, I can perhaps muster the confidence to open up the research process to scrutiny. Anyway, if I do have a good idea and then someone else gets the credit, I will be in the good company of all the other scientists who have put in place the building blocks for the world-changing discovery.

Robot imitation as a method for modelling the foundations of social life

Robot imitation as a method for modelling the foundations of social life: a meeting of robotics and sociology to explore the spread of behaviours through mimesis

Here is the video, posted earlier this month by Frances Griffiths on YouTube, of the meeting of robotics and sociology I blogged about on 21st June. No need for me to write anything more - Roger Stotesbury's excellent 10 minute film explains the whole thing...

Open-ended Memetic Evolution, or is it?

Just finished a paper describing some new results on open-ended memetic evolution from the Artificial Culture project. I describe in some detail one particular experiment in which 2 robots imitate each others' movements. However, here the robots don't simply imitate the last thing they saw; instead they learn and save every observed movement sequence, then when it's a robot's turn to dance it selects one of its 'learned' dances, from memory, at random.

Here is a plot of the movements of the 2 robots for one particular experiment; this picture has been generated by a tool developed by Wenguo Liu that allows us to 'play back' the tracking data recorded by the Vicon position tracking system. The visualisation tool changes the colour of each 'dance', which makes it much easier to then analyse what's going on during the experiment.


Epuck 9 (on the left) starts by making a 3 sided 'triangle' dance, numbered 1 above. Epuck 12 (on the right) then imitates this - badly - as meme number 2, which is a kind of figure-of-8 pattern. It is interesting to see that this 4-sided figure-of-8 movement pattern then appears to become dominant, perhaps because of the initially poor fidelity imitation (1 → 2), then the high fidelity imitation of 2 by epuck9 (2 → 3), then the re-enaction of meme 2 as meme 4. And then subsequent copies of the same figure-of-8 meme then appear to be reasonably good copies, which reinforces the dominance of that meme.

Since the robots are selecting which observed and learned meme to enact, at random, then there is no 'direction' to the meme evolution here. Memes can get longer or shorter - both in the number of sides to the movement pattern, and the length of those sides, and the resulting patterns arise in an unpredictable way from the imperfect 'embodied' imitation of the robots. Thus, we appear to have demonstrated here, open-ended memetic evolution.

Warwick Mimesis project visit to the lab

As a follow-up to a talk I gave last December in Warwick, we were visited in the lab today by a group of social and complexity scientists from Warwick including Frances Griffiths, Steve Fuller and Nick Lee. We had a hugely interesting day discussing the extent to which (or, indeed, if at all) robots could be used to model mimesis in society.

The day started with me describing the embodied imitation-of-movement experiments that we are currently doing here within the Artificial Culture project, and demonstrating the latest version of the Copybots experiment. After lunch we then had a round table discussion about whether or not such a simple model might have value in social science research and - somewhat to my surprise - there seemed to be strong consensus that there is value and that this (radical) new approach to embodied modelling is something we should actively pursue in future joint projects.

The meeting was filmed by Roger Stotesbury of Jump Off The Screen and I hope to post a link to the video record of the meeting on this blog.

Postscript: here is my blog post with Roger's film of the meeting.

EPSRC HOW? event

Spent a most interesting day today at EPSRC HQ in Swindon. I was one of several academics asked to come and exhibit their work to the staff of the EPSRC. The idea of the event was to enable all of the staff of the council to get an insight into the research that EPSRC funds when, in the normal course of events (I guess), only a relatively few would get to see that research - programme managers for instance.

I took along some e-pucks and a portable arena, which proved very popular, together with this poster for the Artificial Culture project.