The 10 Senses That Will Make Robots More Human

(bells)

Your eyes, your ears, your nose are your sensors.

And what I'm trying to do is to give technology

eyes, ears, and nose.

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We think, traditionally, of having our five senses.

You've got hearing, which helps you to be aware,

especially when driving.

Smell is our passive safety sense.

If there's a fire in this place, the first way

you're gonna know about it is with smell.

Your sense of touch.

You can feel the air moving over your skin.

You maybe feel that you're falling.

Your sense of taste is your tongue, and once I say that

you're like, well, of course.

And your eyes.

You're so visual, it's so important to you, right?

Because for you, it's how you navigate the world.

So we're trying to make robots to operate in a human world.

But it becomes natural to outfit it with

the senses that we use to navigate that world every day.

And as you begin to develop, you know, sensors

for technology, I have to go beyond the basic five senses

to build my research.

We can talk about sense of direction.

You, as a person, do that with your eyes.

Just say, where is the sun in the sky?

So, the GPS chip, which is a sensor that's measuring

radio signals coming in, and figuring out where you are.

Sense of time is another one I love to talk about.

If you think about it with the cell phone, you know

how I'll grab an excuse like, why are we late; well,

my watch was wrong.

They're on the network, they're all synchronized,

and we all know what time it is.

And it's changed thing.

I think people get get places more promptly than

they used to.

Sense of balance is one of the most important

things we have.

Now, you as a person know which way is up.

An accelerometer is a sensor.

It's used to measure motion, and to measure

which way is up.

So, when you turn your screen on your phone,

it's the accelerometer that knows which way is up.

A gyroscope, it's basically a mechanism that can

measure a twist.

So, as you move a device that has a gyroscope in it,

it can tell its orientation.

This is a robot.

It has accelerometers in there.

It has the gyroscopes in there.

It has the pressure sensor in there.

It has an ultrasonic sensor in there.

All of those are coming together to allow this

to perfectly hold its position here off the ground.

So, sensors can be not necessarily a physical,

silicon quantity that I make.

There are metasensors that are beyond that.

We can talk about the sense of humor.

It's one of our most innate things, and we love

to stimulate it.

And we love to record it.

So, the best sensor I have for a sense of humor is

the Like button.

If they pass it on to their friends; it was probably

pretty funny, right?

You know, it's one of those things.

And so, as we begin to bring digital technology

to operate or move around our world, it's the sensors

that are creating this content that we are actually

going to feed into our senses

to recreate that experience.

Virtual reality is really a great demonstrator

for how the sensors have to come together as our

interface into driving the simulation, the virtual reality.

You could imagine a virtual world,

you know, you like to track your physical movements

in the real world, and so the ultrasonic technology

gives a distance measurement in three dimensional space.

And so that works together with the gyroscope,

which gives relative, angular changes, and the

accelerometer, which gives relative linear changes,

to give a more accurate representation of any

peripheral, relative to the head mounted display.

Your way you move through the world right now

is you use your sensors.

And as we begin in this age of robotics, we're trying

to outfit that with the sensors to help it move

around the real world.

At the same time, we're using sensors to digitize

the world around us, to create a virtual world

so people can share these experiences.

And that's really what the sensors is about.

It's bridging the gap between the real world

and the virtual world.

It's just fun to be on that edge, that boundary

between these two things, and just to see

where it's gonna take us.

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