Giving Robot Vacuums a Personality

In IEEE Spectrum:

It's surprisingly easy for humans to endow robots with personalities. We've seen it happen most poignantly with EOD robots, but it's a common occurrence for people with domestic robots as well. However, these robots were never designed to have personalities. They're designed to do a job, and they're designed to be able to interact with people to the extent that it facilitates their ability to do that job, but service robots are really not programmed to be your pet, your best friend, or a member of your family.


Whether it's in their programming or not is, to some extent, beside the point, since it happens anyway. And when it happens, it dramatically changes the way that people interact with what on a primary level is intended to be little more than a tool. Realizing this, a team from Delft University of Technology and Philips Research in the Netherlands decided to take a look at how people actually want their robot vacuums to behave, and what kinds of personalities they'd like them to display.