A major trend in robotics — envisioning machines as companions — was on display earlier this month at a conference in Atlanta. At left, a RoboThespian by Engineered Arts Limited is a life-sized, fully interactive, multilingual robot designed for human interaction in a public environment. At right, a Five Finger Hand, a robotics component built by Schunk, is designed to help robots interact with door handles and elevator buttons.

On a recent morning Natanel Dukan walked into the Paris offices of French robot maker Aldebaran and noticed one of the company’s humanoid NAO robots sitting on a chair. Dukan, an electrical engineer, could not resist. Bending over, he kissed the robot on the cheek. In response the NAO tilted its head, touched his cheek and let out an audible smack.

It is certainly a very French application for a robot, but the intimate gesture by the $16,000, 2-foot robot, now being used in academic research labs and robotic soccer leagues, also reflects a significant shift.

Until recently, most robots were carefully separated from humans. They have largely been used in factories to perform repetitive tasks that required speed, precision and force. That generation of robots is dangerous, and they have been caged and fenced for the protection of workers.

But the industrial era of robotics is over. And robots are beginning to move around in the world.

More and more, they are also beginning to imitate — and look like — humans. And they are beginning to perform tasks as humans do, too.

Many of the new generation of robots are tele-operated from a distance, but are increasingly doing tasks independent of direct human control.

Designed as partners

For instance, Romeo, a 5-foot humanoid robot, will soon be introduced by Aldebaran as a “big brother” to the pipsqueak, kissing NAO robot. Created with the assistance of $13.8 million from the French government, the costly robot is being programmed to care for older people and assist in the home.

To provide useful assistance, it will have to do more than the repetitive work being performed by commercial robots in factories, hospitals and other settings. Moreover, the new robots are designed not just to replace but to collaborate with humans.

The idea that robots will be partners of humans, rather than stand-ins or servants, is now driving research at universities and industrial laboratories. This year, new U.S. industry standards for robotic manufacturing systems were published, underscoring the emergence of the field. The standards specify performance requirements that will permit human workers to collaborate with robots directly, and they reverse manufacturing guidelines from 1999 that prohibited “continuous attended operations” requiring humans to be in close contact with robots that were deemed unsafe by the industry.

Today’s robot designers believe their creations will become therapists, caregivers, guides and security guards, and will ultimately perform virtually any form of human labor. (Robots that can think on their own — that is, perform with high levels of artificial intelligence — have yet to arrive.)

The key to this advance is the new robots’ form. Their humanlike appearance does more than satisfy science-fiction fantasies. Roboticists say they are choosing the human form for both social and technical reasons. Robots that operate indoors, in particular, must be able to navigate a world full of handles, switches, levers and doors that have been designed for humans.

Roboticists also point out that humans have an affinity for their own shape, easing transitions and making collaboration more natural. Creating robots in humanoid form also simplifies training and partnerships in the workplace, and increases their potential in new applications like caregiving.

Rapid advancement

It is still unclear how well these new faux-people will be accepted by society, for they raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human. However, rapid improvements in computer vision, processing power and storage, low-cost sensors, as well as new algorithms that allow robots to plan and move in cluttered environments, are making these new uses possible and in the process changing the nature of robotics.

“This is the wave that’s happening in robotics right now,” said Charlie Kemp, an associate professor in biomedical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. “Things are not the same when you’re interacting with people. That’s where we want robots to be; it’s where we see there are huge opportunities for robots; and there are very distinct requirements from what led to the classic industrial robot.”

And so on factory floors around the world, a new breed of robot is being manufactured by companies like Rethink Robotics of Boston, which makes a humanoid robot for simple factory automation tasks, and Universal Robots of Odense, Denmark, which makes a dual robot-arm system designed for doing more traditional factory applications, but without cages.

Rethink Robotics recently released a video of its robot, Baxter, making a cup of coffee with a Keurig coffee machine. The company said the humanoid robot, with tong-like hands and a computer-screen face, was trained to carry out a variety of preprogrammed coffee-making tasks in just several hours. In Kemp’s Healthcare Robotics lab at Georgia Tech, a 5-foot robot named Cody, which is able to sense forces on its arms and has a base that allows it to move gracefully, is being used as a dance partner for both experienced human dancers and patients in physical therapy.

“This is a way that robots can be used for fun, interactive exercise in rehabilitation,” Kemp said. “We can also use it as a tool to understand whole body physical interaction between people and robots.”

At Carnegie Mellon University, Manuela Veloso, a professor of computer science, has developed a series of mobile robots she calls CoBots to perform tasks like delivering mail, guiding visitors to appointments and fetching coffee. She calls it “symbiotic autonomy,” since the robots also rely on humans. For example, because they don’t have arms, they can’t operate elevators, so they have been programmed to wait and ask for human assistance. If they get lost, they stop, call up a map of the building on their computer screens, interrupt a passing human and say, “I am lost, can you tell me where I am?”

“The robotics community calls the idea cheating,” Veloso said, “but it’s not. It’s the secret to real autonomy.”

In a shift away from robots made to perform in factories, designers are putting the “human” into humanoids, creating a new generation designed to safely interact in public.