Robot to take centre stage

A ROBOT which has been helping a team of researchers at Heriot-Watt University with a study is celebrating the end of the project with a poetry reading at the Fringe.

Sarah, who has an expressive face and was designed in Poland, has been involved in a six-week experiment looking at how humans react with robots.

She spent three weeks living autonomously in a lab in one of the longest experiments of its kind carried out in Europe.

Ruth Aylett, professor of computing science, said: “We know that people feel more relaxed with robots when they can predict what they are going to do, the way we can read and predict fellow human beings.

“That sort of emotional analysis means that robots which have facial expressions are important, but anything too human can be counter-
productive, leading to overly high expectations of what the robot can do.”

Sarah and Prof Aylett will be performing a selection of poems at Pulp Fiction, Bread Street, on Monday from noon.