The name for this phenomenon is called pareidolia: the unconscious tendency for humans to organize ambiguous visual info

“One general theme is that if a robot surprises somebody, it makes them pretty uncomfortable,” Hurst said. “But that’s also true for another person. If someone’s behavior surprises you or is unpredictable, it’s the same mechanism, I think, that makes people uncomfortable around a particular robot.”

An effective robot must be able to perform its task safely and accurately. But the more robots enter social settings like restaurants, hospitals, grocery stores, and care homes, the more it matters what kind of emotional response they spark in the people who encounter them. A robot’s physical actions, in this case, are only one part of its function. If it’s intended to serve or assist humans, but makes them feel alienated or uncomfortable in the process, the robot is not a success.

A robot face can have practical uses. A pair of eyes gives people a sense of the robot’s “gaze,” or where its attention is oriented. The direction “pick that up,” Cakmak said, is meaningless unless accompanied by some visual gesture that indicates what “that” is.

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uingly, many of these schedules weren’t packed with back-to-back meetings. Henderson, for instance, walked to work while listening to audiobooks. Then he built in space — “I like a few breathers throughout the day,” he said. “I find having a couple of half-hour breaks is much less stressful than having constant, back-to-back meetings.” Feeling rushed and frantic is about a scarcity of time.

Placing cameras or sensors at the highest point on the robot’s form gives it an unobstructed view, just like the eyes on a human face. A face can also help human users quickly distinguish the robot’s front from its back. Depending on the design, it can signal to users what information the robot has received, or just whether it’s on or off.

A key task for roboticists is avoiding what McGinn calls “unbalanced design,” where user expectations differ from the machine’s actual ability. This is why even though the presence of a mouth makes a robot seem friendlier, Cakmak would still caution designers against slapping one on, as the presence of a mouth that doesn’t communicate verbally would be confusing to users.

Their efforts paid off. Digit’s steady and agile gait is an engineering triumph. “It’s by far my favorite of the bipedal robots,” McGinn said. Yet even a robot’s walk can trigger emotions in observers. Agility is planning tweaks to the next revision that will change the “clank clank” sound of the robot’s gait, which sounded to some early users like an angry stomp. But it still has to make some sound, or it could be perceived as sneaky. Digit will be working alongside people, and a good co-worker doesn’t sneak up on you or stomp around menacingly.

Avoiding unbalanced design is a keystone of ethical robot design. A designer less concerned about ethics could use those same familiar markers to mislead people about their robot’s purposes. Users will automatically turn their gazes toward a friendly, inviting face, something that the designers of robotic photographers and temperature scanners have taken advantage of. It’s one thing if it’s been disclosed to you that a robot will be taking your photograph or biometric information, and something else if not.

Robots have no emotional states or personalities, but that doesn’t stop us from projecting onto them. (And given the difficulty and expense of mechanically reproducing the flexibility of a human face, most robot faces are rendered on screens.) In a 2018 study, Cakmak and her colleagues found that people rated robots as more “friendly” the more human-like facial features they had, and cited those without mouths or pupils as significantly more “creepy” and “untrustworthy” — or “soulless,” as one participant put it. The presence of robot eyelids also triggered strong feelings, with subjects describing the robots as “sly” and “smug.”

The absence of a head didn’t initially bother Digit’s creators. The Agility team was more focused on the challenge of perfecting the machine’s bipedal locomotion — in other words, making it walk really well.

Dublin-based Akara Robotics, which developed Stevie, a socially assistive robot designed for eldercare facilities, chose to make the brown eyes on Stevie’s screen face blink occasionally when the robot is on standby, just to let people nearby know that the robot is still on.

When it comes to technology that humans must interact with, “whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to anthropomorphize it,” said Akara CEO Conor McGinn, an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin and Stevie’s chief designer. “There’s common ground between the tech and the person that isn’t there if it doesn’t present in an anthropomorphic way.”

When it comes to robots, that unconscious expectation of seeing a recognizable face — and the subtle sense of frustration or unease when it’s not met — becomes more pronounced the more humanoid a robot is. Plenty of robots used in industrial settings don’t have a recognizable equivalent to a head or face, and human workers don’t care. A robot that evokes as much of the human form as Digit does, however, doesn’t get that same pass.

Humans derive an enormous amount of nonverbal information from faces. We infer emotional states from people’s expressions, and follow their gaze to determine their intent or take instructions. People make unconscious assumptions about others’ personality traits from their faces alone.

We are designed to constantly be evaluating the people, animals, and things around us: Is this a threat to me? What is he planning to do? We do the same with robots. Particularly now, in the relatively early days of encountering robots in our daily lives, we don’t instinctively know how to read a robot the way we do a person. Some attempts at directing us are more elegant than others: Jaguar affixed fake eyes to prototype autonomous vehicles it road-tested in England to try to make pedestrians more confident that the vehicles could see them. It succeeded mainly in making the vehicles look bored.