Meet Boxie, the cardboard robot created by Alexander Reben at MIT Media Lab.
Boxie is a very simple robot. Boxie's purpose is to wander around somewhat helplessly, its cardboard head wobbling and its toddler-like voice plaintively calling out for attention, waiting for a human to come rescue it. Which humans inevitably do: The attraction to cuteness is written into our very genes.
How do we leverage people to make systems more intelligent, efficient, and successful? Is it worthwhile to involve people heavily in the goals of a system? How does a system most effectively coax stories out of people? To investigate these questions, a robot was built that facilitated interaction and documentary gathering within an ubiquitous media framework. We then let the robot roam freely, with the goal of capturing stories about its environment. This was done by leveraging human mobility and intelligence, as the robot relied upon people to move long distances and achieve its goals. The end products were a study of how people related to a robot asking for assistance and interaction in various ways, and a set of movies showing the robot navigating the resulting "thread" of a narrative.
- MIT Media Lab
Boxie was voiced by Nan Wei Gong of the Responsive Environments group at the Media Lab.
"The idea was to create a robot that was interesting enough for people to engage with it and offer to help it, carrying it around and up and down stairs to show it things," says Reben, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.
"We chased after this elusive thing, called 'cuteness.' We wanted to make people feel empathy for the robot. We wanted it to look helpless, so hopefully someone would feel bad for it and want to help it."
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