Dogs Respond More Positively Than Humans To Autonomous Robots

Dogs are known to be the friendliest and most obedient animals to human, and they turn out to be very robot friendly too.

Starship Technologies is a startup company in San Francisco, which has launched self-driving delivery robots that are very effective and highly supported. Starship Technologies' self-driving delivery robots have been applied and successfully deployed throughout Europe and the United States. Six months ago, the company announced they received $ 25 million in funding to soon deploy and develop more of these robots.

Guide Dogs' Policy Lead, Travel, and Mobility, John Welsman, told The Evening Standard that the environment and the way we live have been dramatically changed by technology. It is critical to ensure that people have a safe and convenient living environment. To make sure that these autonomous robots won't cause any difficulties for visually impaired people, Starship collaborated with Guide Dogs for the Blind, a UK charity, for a test to see what will happen when guide dogs and these robots have an encounter.

They let the owners or trainers take the dogs on the road and meet the automatic delivery robots. No matter how the dogs are approached by the robots, face to face, from the back or at a crossroad, they never reacted negatively. Most of them just stopped, looked and waited for these robots to get closer.

The results from this test can be used by Guide Dogs to train new dogs to have the same calm reaction, not just with the robots but with other obstacles as well.

While all the dogs in the test brought a friendly response to the autonomous robots, there have been many cases where people have attacked self-driving cars and security robots. The number of verbal attacks on robots and machines is even more severe.

Even so, those attacks and aggression do not reduce the application of machinery and technology to our lives, whether on the job or on the street. The number of machines is still increasing.

Therefore, it's critical that we think about the way these robots could impact every member of society including visually impaired people and their guide dogs.