Thesis

We believe that robots won't be widely adopted into human society until they learn how to behave around people. Having a helpful robot nearby should feel like working alongside a good colleague: welcoming, collaborative, and attuned to social cues.

Robots are getting capable fast, allowing us to dream of putting them in increasingly complex everyday environments. They've taken over the road, begun to work in warehouses, and many leading robotics labs are even training them to fold your laundry or wash your dishes.

But when we're putting robots in environments around real people, what a robot can do is only half the problem. The other equally important half that's currently neglected by most of the robotics industry is how people feel about these robots. Last year, two thirds of surveyed Americans said they'd want a robot at home. But only fifteen percent said they knew much about them, and half said they wouldn't be comfortable with a human-sized one in the house. What worried them was the machine's presence: getting hurt by it, being intimidated by it.¹

There are many research and field studies on what happens when a capable robot arrives somewhere it doesn't fit. When a hospital introduced a delivery robot, postpartum nurses loved it, calling it “my buddy.” But in medical units, the very same robot got kicked, told to shut up, and accused of lacking “the manners that we teach our children.” The behavior that was so helpful in the baby room caused the robot to interrupt nurses who were on the phone or in the middle of an emergency.² When a grocery chain put a spill-spotting robot in its stores, staff described it as “not doing much of anything besides getting in the way” and shoppers found it creepy. Rather than change the robot, the chain played up its personality, throwing it birthday parties in the stores and letting it become the mascot, and shoppers came around.³ In one of the longest home studies of a social robot, the main reason people gave for still using it after six months was how sociable they found it.⁴

All of these examples have something in common: the robots' capabilities stayed the same from one situation to the next, and the surrounding context determined whether people accepted them. We think a great robot companion reads the room: it knows the unwritten rules, respects how people live and work, and earns its place. Memora's mission is to teach robots that social sense by learning real human habits, preferences, and routines, so the machines entering our lives are comfortable to be around.

This sociability can't be learned in a lab. Learning this requires robots to interact with people in real places long enough to be accepted or rejected. Thus, our strategy centers around deployments in real environments with dense human-robot interaction, carrying what we learn from one into the next.

The Memora team

Have a place in mind for a robot? Let's talk.

contact@memoralabs.app