Puppy power

Robot dogs have come a long way since K9. Is man’s best friend about to be knocked off its pedestal, asks Kate Douglas

WITH sleek metallic bodywork and a Cyclops eye, it doesn't look much like a flesh-and-blood dog. And yet, watching Sony's robotic pooch gambol and lark around, it's hard not to be moved by its puppyish charms. Its name is Aibo, which means "companion" in Japanese. It can walk, sit, sleep, beg and perform lots of other convincingly dog-like actions. But is it good enough to fool a real dog?

That's what Adam Miklosi wondered when he saw Aibo in action. As an expert in dog behaviour and cognition, he was well placed to find out. So, last year, he invited Aibo, together with robot developer Frederic Kaplan from Sony's labs in Paris, to visit him at Eotvbs University in Budapest, Hungary, for some close encounters of the canine kind.

The outcome, unfortunately, was a let-down for Miklosi. Real dogs barely gave Aibo a second glance. But the trip to Hungary wasn't a complete waste of time. As a result of meeting real dogs, Aibo has learned some new tricks, and its creators have fresh insights into our relationship with robots.

When Aibo went on the market in 1999, it sold out in Japan in 20 minutes and worldwide in four days. Today more than 100,000 people own one. Although the robotic pets were not designed to emulate real dogs, Sony envisages them winning a similar place in their owners' affections by forming relationships with their masters.

Brand-new Aibos all behave alike. But over time they develop their own personality as they interact with people. Just how they develop depends on the interaction between their environment and their innate abilities. Commercial models of Aibo are programmed with hundreds of different behaviours, such as sitting and lifting a paw. They also have five instincts - curiosity and the desires to interact, exercise, rest and sleep - along with six emotional states-joy, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and discontent. Each robot learns from its experiences, which reinforce certain behaviours, instincts and emotions while knocking others back. The result, according to Sony, is a bond between owner and robot pet built on their shared experience. But Aibo isn't infinitely flexible. "When you buy the robot it can turn into a fixed number of future robots," says Kaplan.

Sony is aware of the limitations and has tried to make Aibo more malleable. Owners have always been able to choose whether their pet develops a puppy-like personality or behaves more like a mature animal. Then, last year, Sony began selling software that allows people to program their Aibos to perform tailored sequences of movements or to react in characteristic ways to being stroked or talked to. But that's not enough for some owners. They want to customise their Aibos, and a few have started hacking into Aibo to install characters such as Scooby-Doo and Bender the wisecracking robot from the cartoon Futurama. Responding to this demand, last month Sony launched Aibo Open-R, which allows owners to develop their own software (www.aibo.com/openr).

That's all very well for computer geeks, but what about ordinary Aibo lovers? That's where the robot's visit to Budapest might deliver thr goods. As Kaplan watched real dogs being put through their paces, he started thinking of ways to make Aibo more appealing and a better companion. He realised that one strategy might be to give it a new instinct - the desire to please a trainer. Then its personality really would be shaped by experience shared with a human.

The first hurdle was working out how to train the robot. The animal behaviourists suggested several options, including a technique called clicker training that has proved very successful with all sorts of animals from guide dogs to dolphins. Kaplan was keen to try it, so he reprogrammed a standard Aibo with the instinct to please its trainer and set to work.

Clicker training allows a trainer to mould an animal's behaviour by letting it know when it is moving closer to a goal. It's a bit like the children's game "hotter, hotter, colder, colder". Animals learn to associate the sound of the clicker with a reward that they'll receive once they accomplish a new routine. They also know that they'll carry on hearing the click as long as they are moving in the right direction. In Aibo's language that meant using the words "good" or "bravo!" instead of a click and rewarding it with a pat when it completed a routine.

Clicker training was a success. Kaplan's customised Aibo learned new things much more quickly than an ordinary one. It could also be trained to perform rare behaviours from its repertoire and put these together in unique combinations. What's more, it could learn to perform these new routines in response to specific commands from its trainer. So, for example, the word "spin" might prompt it to spin clockwise. It could even be trained to perform a trick whenever its owner came into the room.

Using the same method an Aibo can also learn to alter its perception of the world. The trainer would prompt this by reinforcing or playing down the robot's emotional or instinctive response to certain stimuli so that, for example, it might grow to become extremely excited by white objects and fearful of anything blue. The result is a customised pet - one whose personality you have shaped. "It makes the relationship between the owner and the robot special because it is shaped by the history of their interaction," says Kaplan.

Sony has no plans to sell trainable Aibos any time soon. But in future there may be an increased demand for realistic robotic pets to replace living ones, if another study carried out by Miklosi and Kaplan is anything to go by. Their aim this time is to see how people react to Aibo compared with a real puppy. Most adults are wary of the robot, but kids behave quite differently. "Children try to play with Aibo as if it were a dog," says Miklosi. What's more, they actually prefer Aibo to the puppy and seem more at ease with it. This might be because city children have little experience of living animals, according to Miklosi. Maybe it's just that the puppy is too boisterous, adds Kaplan, but it could also be that the younger generation is more comfortable than adults at using and interacting with machines and computers and so more willing to try to strike up a relationship with a robot.

This got the researchers wondering what they'd need to do to make a robot that related to its owner like a real pet. Miklosi is interested in how a healthy attachment forms between a dog and its owner, but it's hard to investigate such a relationship. He points out that the nature of their attachment depends on how the animal is treated, and there's no way researchers can examine interactions in full because they don't have 24-hour access to dogs and their owners. But with Aibo it could be different. Miklosi envisages naive robots kitted out with surveillance equipment spending a week with people and recording all the interactions that take place. It would be a great way of finding out what sorts of interactions lead to successful bonding.

Studies suggest that children play with Aibos as if they were real puppies. They also seem to prefer the robots to the real thing.

Once you know how to get a good relationship going between a robotic dog and a human, how far can you go? Kaplan says the obvious next step is to consider the possibility of creating a robot that can love us.

But how would you know whether an Aibo had become emotionally attached to its owner? Miklosi and his colleagues have been trying to address the same question in dogs. They measured canine attachment by adapting a test used to assess the bond between mother and infant. And having seen it in action, Kaplan now thinks it could be used on robots too.

The "strange situation test" reveals the delicate balance between dependence and autonomy that is the hallmark of a healthy relationship between an infant and its carer. A properly attached child will play and explore a new environment when its mother is nearby but become distressed if she leaves. Given time, the infant will settle with a stranger in the unfamiliar setting but its preference for its mother becomes apparent when she returns. Dogs behave in the same characteristic way - provided they have a good relationship with their owner.

Kaplan thinks there's a lot to be learned from the "strange situation test". "It's a kind of Turing test for social relationships," he says.

If the idea of a robot that loves you seems bizarre, abhorrent or just plain scary then you're probably showing your age. Kaplan, however, is excited by the prospect. "Maybe in the future people will have some kind of long-term relationship with the robot," he says. He argues that, historically, we have always used our machine creations to understand ourselves. "This is a chance of rethinking our relationship with machines - how we define ourselves through the machines we build."