Mataric in the New Yorker

This week's New Yorker features a lengthy profile of Maja Matarić, USC computer science professor and author of The Robotics Primer. New Yorker writer Jerome Groopman writes about Matarić's work with stroke and Alzheimer’s patients and autistic children. She and her lab are trying to design machines that can engage directly with such patients and encourage both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.

This excerpt from Groopman's piece shows how human interaction with robots has progressed light years from the Star Wars-Isaac Asimov images that many of us still carry around in our heads:

A woman I will call Mary, a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, suffered a stroke in 2001, when she was forty-six. She spent six months working with a physical therapist at the U.S.C. Medical Center to regain strength in her weakened right arm and leg, before taking part in Matarić’s study. I watched a videotape of her session with Matarić. Mary, who was dressed in a white blouse and dark slacks, shuffled slowly to a desk stacked with magazines. There was a shelf nearby, set above shoulder level. She looked at the robot, several feet away, and waved to it. “Come over here,” she said warmly.

The robot, which was three feet high and looked a little like R2-D2, in “Star Wars,” scooted close to her and stopped. “Very good,” Mary said.

Set on a mobile base with rotary wheels, the robot could turn in any direction and move around the room, guided by sonar. It tracked Mary’s movement with a scanning laser range finder; a pan-tilt-zoom camera allowed it to look at Mary, turn away, or shake its head. A speaker, embedded in the robot’s side, produced prerecorded speech and sound effects.

Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh.

The whole thing's fascinating - read it here. Dying to know more about the book? Dig the video!