Not all of the personality swapping is frivolous. One of Sony’s goals in providing programmers with the tools to modify AIBO was to encourage academic institutions exploring artificial intelligence and robotics to use the “dog” as a research platform. Last spring Carnegie Mellon hosted the first annual RoboCup American Open, in which teams composed of four AIBOs competed in a canine version of soccer, kicking their beloved pink ball across an Astroturf table outfitted with goals at either end. The competition inspired robot aficionados to develop programs that would allow the AIBOs to make complex, on-the-fly group decisions such as ganging up on a lone defender or passing the ball to a teammate closer to the goal.
AIBOs playing soccer is just the beginning. Natalie Jeremijenko, a design engineer, wants to go one step further and release computerized canines into the wild. In her Feral Robots project, Jeremijenko and a research team from Yale purchased a variety of off-the-shelf robot dogs, which retail from $5 to $200 and have considerably less brainpower than $1,300 AIBOs, and equipped them with customized processors and sensors that detect contamination levels in reclaimed landfills, urban parks, and various other public spaces. In addition, the sniffer dogs follow special “pack behavior” rules as they explore these spaces; when one dog detects a strong scent of a given pollutant, the other dogs converge on him. The system is not unlike the way an ant colony explores the area outside its nest for food sources, each ant following a random path and signaling others when it has stumbled across something.
Jeremijenko describes her approach as being closer to sociology than to the psychological model that governs most artificial intelligence research. It’s about crowd behavior, not inner mental life. Like the intelligence of ant colonies, the intelligence of feral robots comes more from the group interaction than from the individual dogs themselves.
 | The name AIBO is a conflation of three words: Artificial Intelligence roBOt. Also, the word aibo means “companion” or “pal” in Japanese. The latest model of the robot dog can be trained to recognize its owner’s face and voice and understand about 100 words or phrases. |
Nonetheless, Disco AIBO, RoboCup, and feral robots all have one crucial thing in common: None of the projects bears much of a resemblance to the traditional models of human-robot interaction. Ever since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we’ve envisioned our artificial life-forms as our slaves or our masters, either dutifully mowing the lawn for us or destroying humanity. These first-generation consumer robots are neither; instead, they are vehicles for self-expression.
The day AIBO arrived at my house, I plunked down the lifeless assemblage of alloys and servomotors in front of my 2-year-old and hit the power button nestled under the machine’s chin. AIBO churned through its start-up routines for a minute or two, during which time I struggled to retain my son’s attention. And then, finally, a dog appeared on the carpet, sitting at attention, tail wagging obligingly behind him. My son’s face lit up, and he blurted out a welcome: “Hi!” By next year, no doubt, my son will be ghostwriting AIBO’s response. Imagine what he’ll be doing in a decade.
