Emotionally sensitive robots capable of performing tasks on behalf of Facebook users are being dreamt up by inventors at the company.
The social media giant’s vision is revealed in a European patent that shows the devices, about the height of a person, as potential future “proxies” for its 2.4 billion users.
The GPS-equipped robots would seek out people to make friends with and animals and “objects of interest” that could make an interesting Instagram snap captured on one of its multiple cameras, all controlled remotely via the cloud from the user’s desktop or phone.
The droids would be programmed to interact by scanning faces and body language, an individual’s “likely emotional state” and “sounds emitted”, allowing them to chat with people via speakers and microphones.
The patent contains blueprints for the “interactive robots” with an iPad-sized screen displaying a human account holder’s head on top of a triangular chassis. Designers say the “mobile machines”, which would be manufactured to cut “costs and complexity”, would have wheels and tank-style tracks that can cope with different terrains.
It opens the possibility of building the kind of mass-market humanoid bot imagined in I, Robot, the 2004 film starring Will Smith that was set in 2035, though early drawings more closely resemble a Dalek from Dr Who.
Facebook foresees the technology being fitted into a drone to swim underwater or fly — and could even be installed in an unmanned spacecraft.
Inventors Eric Deng and Andrew Gold say current droid designs are “ill-equipped for interacting or facilitating interactions with people or other autonomous robots”.
The company is already working with New York University on artificial intelligence robotics, including training cyborg hands to grip more effectively.
Facebook declined to give further details about its latest robot project, saying only that the patent was not necessarily “an indication of future plans”.
