Sean Andrist

We've already got robot receptionists, who respond to human interactions -- now we have a robot that changes how it looks depending on your personality.

This robot, designed by Sean Andrist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been developed to respond to 'social gaze' -- essentially the social context in which we look at one another. The robot uses social cues, which it processes via a bespoke algorithm, to figure out what kind of personality you have and respond accordingly.


This, hopes Andrist, will improve a user's "subjective rating of the robot's performance", and "improve compliance with the robot's request to engage in a task for a longer period of time".

The algorithm depends on one major factor: whether you're an extrovert or an introvert. Introverts tend to look at their conversational partners less than extroverts, and, like a human would, the robot picks up on this. This data can then be used by the robot to interact better with a human.

When this hypothesis was tested with human participants, Andrist and his team found that subjects were more likely to comply with robots that matched their own personality.

Improved understanding of social cues isn't just good for making humans comfortable, though -- it can have wider effects. "In the area of rehabilitation, social robots hold great promise for improving the quality of life of the elderly, individuals with physical impairment, and those with cognitive disorders," wrote Andrist. "they offer a particularly powerful way of improving motivation and compliance in rehabilitation settings due to their physical embodiment and ability to use nonverbal communication channels." "By effectively taking advantage of these abilities and designing methods for adapting to the characteristics of their users, these systems can dramatically improve the quality of life for people in need."

There are many other teams working on believable robot personalities, including Google who were awarded a patent in April 2015 for a process that could allow users to download personalities on demand. "The robot personality may also be modifiable within a base personality construct (i.e., a default-persona) to provide states or moods representing transitory conditions of happiness, fear, surprise, perplexion (e.g., the Woody Allen robot), thoughtfulness, derision (e.g., the Rodney Dangerfield robot), and so forth," states the patent.