So, other than the undeniable cuteness of watching a little yellow silicone snowman tear up a rug, why does Keepon matter? Keepon is designed to “perform emotional and attention exchange” with humans, particularly children. Using the two CCD cameras behind his little eyes, and the microphone hidden behind his little button nose (oh anthropomorphizing powers! definitely he), Keepon can direct respond to audio/visual stimuli and direct attention to his environment. You can watch him checking out a pink dog-like-thing and then bop at the sight of a person on the NICT site: Keepon's attentive/emotive actions (MPEG 2.6MB). He's not the first dancing robot (see PDRP and Qrio), but he is the first to dance autonomously (i.e.: not pre-programmed with a dance routine), and that's key. A significant pile of research has shown that interactions between people take place on many levels and that even a simple conversation is substantially influenced by the body language of the participants. In a post on the NewScientistTech site about Keepon (Robots with rhythm could rock your world), Marek talks about the importance of rhythm and synchrony to making us feel comfortable interacting with 'bots:

"In the future you are going to be talking to some robot and just the ability of the robot to nod to what you are saying will make it easier to interact,"

What really drew my attention to the story (other than my incredible weakness for dancing yellow marshmallows), was the end of that post:

Michalowski's team displayed the Keepon at the annual open house of NICT in Japan, where over 200 children aged from 2 years old to their mid-teens were encouraged to dance with it while songs were played. Many children chose not to dance, perhaps because they were embarrassed, Michalowski says. However, the team noticed that children were more likely to dance if the robot was itself moving in time to music, rather than if it was moving randomly.

It's all about the Uncanny Valley: the belief that our emotional response to increasingly humanoid-like robots will be increasingly positive until we reach the edge of the Uncanny Valley, or the point at which they become uncannily human, when our reaction suddenly changes to repulsion (at about 75% human-like). Our faith is restored at about 85%, at which point we quickly rise back up to full familiarity:

Illustration credit: Karl MacDorman.

Important take away point: zombies get no respect. Other important take away point: it's generally believed that we experience the repulsion because the creatures are human enough that we recognize them as human but there's something wrong — shuffling gait, insistence on eating brains, trailing body parts — and so we turn in fear and run. As we reach the other side of the perceptual Valley, those odd or unfamiliar traits go away and we feel much more at peace. Research like Keepon and Roillo is important because it gives us bridges to cross the Valley. Every step we take across those bridges is like a mirror turned on ourselves: if we feel a stronger familial tie to a little dancing yellow ball than to the awkward but much more humanoid Actroid robots, what does that say about us?