A bin-shaped robot with glowing eyes and the curiosity of a school-aged child could be the answer to Australia’s loneliness epidemic.

Koobo is shaped like a black box, with eyes that appear from beneath a lid and a personality powered by AI.

He’s designed to ask questions like a child or the curious and friendly robot from the 1980s film Short Circuit.

The adorable creation was not originally designed to address a wider social issue, biomedical engineer and inventor Jordan Nguyen said, but to be a companion for his grandmother who had become lonely due to visitor restrictions at her nursing home.

Early tests with young and older people quickly proved Koobo’s appeal and the robot’s potential not to replace human companionship but to keep subjects talking when it was not available.

“Everyone’s become emotionally attached to him, which is a very strange thing to even say but it’s true, he’s like part of the family now,” Dr Nguyen told AAP.

“I want him to be a tool, particularly in the aged care (sphere) but also for young people as well, and I want him to help encourage and facilitate human-to-human connection.”

A working prototype of the companion robot will be shown off at the Australian Cyber Conference in Canberra on Tuesday in one of several demonstrations of artificial intelligence technology.

A future commercial release for Koobo has become “very likely,” Dr Nguyen said, with a YouTube series dedicated to its evolution and plans to raise funds to support development.

Loneliness is a growing social issue in Australia, with the Ending Loneliness Together report finding more than one in four people suffered persistence feelings of loneliness, with young people and women the most affected.

But if robotic companions are to take off users will need to carefully research what information they collect, where they store it, and how they use it, Dr Nguyen said, to ensure vulnerable people are not taken advantage of by tech firms.

“Robots can face people a lot more, can record a lot more and it’s the sort of thing that people need to know about, and the responsibility of companies to be transparent with the data they’re collecting,” he said.

“We do walk this very important line in ethics, which is if robots can elicit empathy the last thing we want is for that to be exploited.”

The Canberra conference, held from Monday to Wednesday, will also hear from speakers about growing online security threats, AI regulation and quantum computing.

 

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson
(Australian Associated Press)