This Terrifying Life-Size Robot Bear Serves an Actual Purpose

Roboticists build their creations for a lot of reasons. The most common, of course, is to build robots to do actual work. Everything from industrial welding robots to robotic vacuum cleaners fit into that category. Sometimes robots are just made for fun. But every now and then, robots are assembled for research purposes in order to study how robots themselves are able to learn. That’s the case with this absolutely terrifying life-size robot bear that was designed specifically to give hugs in order to study how robots can learn from observation.

This robot bear, which is taller than the full-grown man seen in the video, may look completely horrifying, but its purpose isn’t to strike fear into our hearts. It was actually built to study “Bayesian Interaction Primitives,” which is a technique for robots to learn how to operate. That’s an important area of study as humans and robots spend more time near each other. A robot can certainly be explicitly pre-programmed to perform a job, but what happens when a human interacts with that robot in an unexpected way? That has happened many times in industrial settings, and has led to many injuries and deaths.

If, however, we give robots the ability to learn through observation, they can respond better to unexpected situations safely. The Robo-Bear, developed at Arizona State University’s Interactive Robotics Lab, is demonstrating that by giving hugs. It wasn’t explicitly programmed to give hugs, but instead learned to give a good ol’ fashioned bear hug simply by watching humans embrace. According to the researchers, it only had to see a small number of hug examples to grasp the idea. In the future, this kind of machine learning won’t necessarily be used for hugs, but it will be used to help robots learn how to adapt to new situations in any settings where humans and robots interact with each other.