From February 15 to 17, 2024, the elective module “Social Robots from a Technical, Economic and Ethical Perspective” by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel took place at the FHNW School of Business in Brugg-Windisch. This was the sixth time the course had been held and the first time it had taken place on this campus. The participants were mainly prospective business economists. A GPT called Social Robotics Girl, which is specialized in the topic, was available. A presentation by Claude Toussaint from Navel Robotics enriched the event. He spoke not only about the development of the model, but also about the financing of the company. Among the robots at the demo was Unitree Go2. It comes from the Social Robots Lab (SRL) privately funded by Oliver Bendel and is called Bao (Chinese for “treasure, jewel”) by him. The SRL also includes Alpha Mini, Cozmo, and Hugvie – and the voice-controlled Vector, which was not used in the lessons. When designing their own social robots, the students worked with image generators, this time mainly with DALL-E 3.
BY OLIVER BENDEL
