Scientists at Stanford University, California, have said that robots must be made as lazy as possible in their gestures if we want them to be more interactive. The future will see more human-robot interactions, and humans will expect robots to move more like them. As such, robots should be made as lazy as possible if we want them to move around as gracefully as we do.

During the course of their study, Oussama Khatib and his team modelled out how humans naturally minimised the energy used by their muscles. They then applied the same energy-minimising criteria to direct the way a computer model of a robot moved. "In that way, we are able to produce motions with the robot that look very natural," said Khatib.

"Humans are sort of lazy. That is why we sip coffee with our arm at a 30 to 45-degree angle to our bodies, not with our elbow higher up or tight against our torso," New Scientist quoted him as saying. In a related development, scientists at the University of Gvttingen, Germany, have simulated in a walking robot, those very neuronal principles that help humans adapt their gait to the slope of an incline. — ANI