But what kind of roast would be appropriate if the host is entirely robotic?

On Wednesday 12^th March, Steve Benford and myself headed down to London to meet with Shadow Robot  to get a hands on demonstration of their humanoid robotic hand. After the initial introduction to the team members, we were greeted with a handshake with a robot hand mounted in a teleoperation set-up. This in itself is an interesting and somewhat surreal experience. Western society in particular has a long history with handshakes and their meaning, one possible origin of which was to show that the participants weren’t armed and had a peaceful intent. So how do we interpret a handshake from a robot? From there we had a demonstration of the dual-hand/arm teleoperation setup before having a go for ourselves. I found this a very though-provoking activity, I was immediately imaging all of the things that it could be possible to try out with such a set-up. In particular, activities around interaction with people (especially touching people) that play into the over-arching Somabotics explorations.

Written by Dominic Price, Computer Science Research Fellow