Where is it going with these robots and where is it going with robotic technology?
Somehow I am really questioning whether the whole white plastic tiny human being replicas,
whether they are going to be up to the task.
My name is Edwin Dertien and I am a teacher in the Interaction Technology Master programme.
I teach two courses. One on social robot design and one on mastering tinkering.
The course on social robot design is clustered around a central design project
in which the students have to develop a social robot application for an external client.
One of the projects students are working on is a robot librarian.
We have an example of a social robot dolphin which should become a Playpal
to interest and enthuse people with some anxieties as a kind of way of therapy.
On the one side you can do really complex things making complete humans, simulacrums, that really look like humans.
And on the other hand we are easily persuaded by just a square with a smiley face.
The course mastering tinkering explores the way that we could use tinkering as an approach as a way of creative problem solving.
There is much in academia which is focused and centred around theory
and understanding the world around us in the abstract.
We forget our hands and we forget so often how important it is to give our hands something to do
and learn to reappreciate that we have explored the world around us through our hands
through making stuff to doing these kind of discoveries.
Also in this course students have to work on project cases.
For example coming up with tinkering exercises that helps spark creativity in companies
or tinkering exercises that help in education of children on robotics.
At the heart I am a maker.
I really like making things and I really like this way of exploring the world around me by building stuff,
and finding out what it does and finding out what works and what not.
I am not too serious I guess and I am really critical and also really critical at the things that I make and build.
I truly believe in what I do but not to the point that I also not rigorously want to
probe, test and try out and question the things that I am doing.
It would be really awesome if I, through teaching, through research,
could find a way of developing or designing a robot
that in thirty years, when I actually would really need one, that I could live with,
and that would take some doing, because I am really passionate and really critical,
so a robot that could live up to my own benchmark would be a very good one.
