One robot has a Tupperware bowl for a head, the other a small blue bucket. The heads don't really serve a practical purpose. In fact, the only reason these robots are fitted with heads is to make them look a little more like people. "A robot with just arms, legs, and a torso looks funny. It's just not right," Daan Hobbelen of the Delft Biorobotics Laboratory explains. "It's important for a machine to have a head in order to evoke associations with the way humans walk, but in view of the mechanical nature of the machine, we didn't want to add a realistic head. That could easily become scary." The robots Hobbelen is working on are far from scary. They are stilted figures with silly heads, and once they are switched on, they seem funny, not frightening. The website of the biorobotics lab features films of some of these robots walking, with their researchers walking alongside. Whereas the robots march blindly through the hall, the researcher, like a protective mother hen, is constantly on the lookout for edges of furniture and other hazards. Of course learning to walk involves standing and falling over; it's just that with robots the falling over part can be very expensive.
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