What if robots may talk with people by emitting scents?
— July thirteenth, 2024
Virtually all human-robot interplay (HRI) approaches right now depend on three senses: listening to, sight, and contact. Your robotic vacuum would possibly beep at you, or play recorded or synthesized speech. An LED on its enclosure would possibly blink to crimson to suggest an issue. And cutting-edge humanoid robots might even shake your hand. However what concerning the different senses? Style looks as if a step too far, so researchers at KAIST experimented with “Olfactory Puppetry” to check scent’s suitability for HRI communication.
This idea appears fairly apparent, however there’s little or no formal analysis on the subject. What if a robotic may talk with people by emitting scents?
Think about if a manufacturing unit employee all of the sudden started smelling burning rubber. That might successfully talk the concept a close-by robotic is malfunctioning, with out counting on auditory or visible cues. Or a private assistant robotic may give off the scent of scorching bacon to inform its proprietor that it’s time to get up.
The researchers wished to check these concepts and selected to take action utilizing puppets as a substitute of precise robots. Through the use of puppets — paper cutouts on popsicle sticks — take a look at topics may act out situations. They might then incorporate scent and observe the outcomes.
For that to work, they wanted a strategy to produce particular smells on-demand. They achieved that with a tool constructed utilizing an Arduino Nano R3 board that controls 4 atomizers. These emit rose, citrus, vanilla, and musk scents, respectively. One other system performs the same operate, however with strong fragrances melted by heating components.
This analysis was very open-ended, however the workforce was in a position to decide that individuals desire delicate scents, don’t need these to occur too steadily, and need them to mesh effectively with what their different senses are telling them. That data might be useful for scent-based HRI experiments sooner or later.