Helen Hastie

And that was more accepting and trusting to the participants.

Yes.

So the appearance of a robot is very important, but it is very dependent on the context and the job that it's designed to do.

So your example of WALL-E is great because WALL-E has a few expressions, but uses them really well and is able to convey quite a few social cues, as we call them.

And we've been looking at how trust manifests itself and how it breaks and how you can gain trust back.

An example of that is apologies, whether a robot should apologise on that.

So my student Bitta Neset was looking at this and she found that it's better to apologise, but if you apologise and give more of an explanation, that's even better.

So if you say something like,

Oh, I'm sorry I got that wrong.

I saw a QR code, but it must have been mistaken.

That's better than a simple apology and better than none at all.

So robots should apologize.

I think so.

I don't believe that the all-singing, all-dancing robots are going to be here very soon.

But if you build a robot and it can function well, it should be adopted and used for the benefit of society.

So this was about public engagement around robots that could do the dirty and the dangerous jobs.

So these are robots that could work in nuclear facility, decommissioning energy platforms, these kind of jobs that humans don't necessarily have to be there if a robot can do that.

And so we looked at generational different points of view and we found that the younger generation could see the use of robots and appreciated that there are risks associated with these kind of jobs and maybe robots should be doing them.

Yeah, so it's very important that we create these exhibits that are interactive and really capture kids and their parents' imagination and allow them to get hands-on experience with robots.

Well, during the pandemic, people started to really appreciate the use of robots in these more dangerous situations.