Social Robots Lab Archives

From February 12 to 14, 2024, the elective module “Social Robots” took place at the FHNW School of Business in Olten. This was the fifth time it had been held. This time, a GPT specialized in the topic was available for the first time. Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel repeatedly had it explain the facts and then made additions. Social Robotics Girl, as she is called, was also used by the students in their group work. In this way, they benefited from the lecturer’s knowledge without having to search for the right text passages or call him in. Among the robots at the demo was Unitree Go2 for the first time. It stole the show from all the others, NAO, Pepper and even Alpha Mini. This was mainly due to its fast, fluid movements, its diverse forms of behavior and its surprising tricks. The robot comes from the Social Robots Lab privately funded by Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel and is called Bao (Chinese for “treasure, jewel”) by him. As in 2023, image generators were used to design their own social robots, this time mainly with DALL-E 3 because some of the students had ChatGPT Plus access. The sixth edition will take place in Brugg-Windisch from February 15, 2024. It will mainly be attended by prospective business economists (Photo: Armend Nasufi).

Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel’s privately funded Social Robots Lab (SRL) has been home to the Unitree Go2 since December 2023. It goes by the name Bao (Chinese for “jewel” or “treasure”). Heise writes in an article: “The basic model of the Go2 is equipped with a lidar on the head, which has a hemispherical field of view of 90 degrees vertically and 360 degrees horizontally. The minimum range of the lidar is around 5 cm. This enables the robot to navigate independently in the terrain, recognize obstacles and also avoid them. The robot runs at a speed of up to 2.5 m/s and is extremely agile. … A 2-megapixel camera is also on board, which can be used to take snapshots and videos.” (Heise News, July 27, 2023; own translation) The information systems specialist and technology philosopher is keen to make progress in the field of animal-machine interaction. He defined this field of work in 2013 in his article “Considerations about the Relationship between Animal and Machine Ethics“, based on the concept of animal-computer interaction pioneered by Clara Mancini. Since then, he has developed several artifacts and concepts in this area, including Robocar (modeling for animal-friendly cars), LADYBIRD (prototype of an insect-friendly vacuum cleaner robot), HAPPY HEDGEHOG (prototype of a hedgehog-friendly vacuum cleaner robot), and ANIFACE (concept for a system with facial recognition to identify brown bears). Bao will be used to test the reactions of domestic, farm, and wild animals. The aim is to make robots not only human-friendly, but also animal-friendly (Photo: Frank Graef).