Robots Will Become Lazy!

The future will see more human-robot interactions, and humans will expect robots to move more like them. Scientists at Stanford University, California, have said that robots must be made as lazy as possible, in their gestures, if we want them to be more interactive.
During the course of their study, Oussama Khatib and his team modelled out how humans naturally minimised the energy used by their muscles.
They then applied the same energy-minimising criteria to direct the way a computer model of a robot moved.
“In that way, we are able to produce motions with the robot that look very natural,” said Khatib.
"Humans are sort of lazy. That is why we sip coffee with our arm at a 30 to 45-degree angle to our bodies, not with our elbow higher up or tight against our torso,” New Scientist quoted him as saying.
In a related development, scientists at the University of Göttingen, Germany, have simulated in a walking robot, those very neuronal principles that help humans adapt their gait to the slope of an incline.
‘RunBot’, which holds the world record in speed walking for dynamic machines, uses reflexes driven by peripheral sensors to adjust its movement. Control circuits ensure that the joints are not overstretched or that the next step is initiated as soon as the foot touches the ground.
Only when the gait needs to be adapted, higher organizations, like the brain in the case of humans, and the infrared eye, in RunBot’s case, step in.
The infrared eye leads on to a simpler neural network, which by changing only a few parameters, allows RunBot to adjust its walk, which is then automatically tuned through the robot’s regular circuits.