(girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § We need you § (girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § Come on!

§ § When I need help, and I've got a question § § there's a place I go for inspiration § § Gotta get to the Web, check the girls' investigation § § What girls?

§ (Izzie) § SciGirls!

§ Whoo!

(girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § I need you!

§ (girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § Come on!

§ § You've gotta log on, post, § § upload, pitch in!

Yeah!

§ § Wanna get inside a world that's fascinating?

§ § The time is right 'cause SciGirls are waiting, § (girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § We need you!

§ (girls) § S-C-I-G-I-R-L-S § (Izzie) § SciGirls!!

§ Izzie, I need your help.

You're my only hope.

Huh?

Oh, ah, hey Jake!

What's up?

Need your help, Iz, Fang ran away again.

Oh, again?

Oh, I'm sorry, Jake.

But how am I supposed to help find her from here?

I don't need help finding her, I already did that.

Huh?

Here, let me change your video feed so you can see what the Fang rescue vehicle sees.

Oh, so this is the car's-eye view, huh?

Yup, and here's Fang.

See, every time I get near her, she runs!

Well, let me see that car again.

Maybe Fang doesn't like it.

Whoa!

No wonder she doesn't like it, Jake.

It's totally scary!

I'm calling in backup on this one.

SciGirls!

Oh, ah, hold, hold on, Jake.

And Fang, you hold on too!

(horn honks) Hmm, turtles.

Hmm, wind?

Mmm, not this time.

Oh!

A robot?!

That's kind of like Jake's car.

Hey, let's see what they're up to.

Did you go through the tunnel?

Yeah!

Whoa!

I went through the tunnel like, twice.

We're all really into science, and we all do an after school science club together.

That's actually my shoe right there.

The 4 of us make a really great team.

We all work together, and we all have something to contribute.

Our investigation that we are working on now is about rescue robots.

One, 2, 3, robots!

The best thing about Robin's robots are the rescue part of them and helping people in bad situations.

He's over there.

And we are actually about to go to Robin's lab at Texas A&M University.

The problem is, we just need to figure out where Robin's lab is.

Yeah, we'll get to control robots and all that stuff.

I know!

That's awesome.

§ § Hey, welcome to Texas A&M.

You guys want to do some robotics?YYeah!

Let's go up to the lab.

(Abby) Dr. Robin Murphy invited us to her lab to help her program robots, program their voice and their behaviors, to make them better.

Come on in, I got a robot for you.

(Lindsey) Robin is a computer scientist and an engineer, who works in rescue robots.

This is one of our Extreme models of robots that we buy and we use for disaster response.

(Anna) When I first saw the robot, it really excited me, and it motivated me because I was like wow!

We're going to get to drive that and program it and stuff.

(Robin) What I want to do is introduce you to one of our other robots, in fact, 2 of our robots.

So this is Sheldon, this is one of our basic research robots.

And this is the Survivor Buddy that we've built to go on top of Sheldon or one of the Extremes.

(Abby) It looks kind of like a TV, where you can see the picture instead of it being like a radio and you're just hearing the person.

Like Skype or iChat or something like that.

(Robin) It's a multimedia interface.

(Izzie) Okay, a "multimedia interface."

It's like a person's head.

I wonder if it could find Fang?

So we've got now, instead of just 2-way audio, we've got 2-way video.

So now you've got a super TV that's more like a person's head, which could either be very good, or it could be very creepy.

That's what we need help finding out.

Oh my gosh, this place is so cool.

Dude, there's a train flipped over!

That's awesome.

We need a picture by that sign.

Disaster City is a big simulation world.

It's a facility used to train people for emergency situations.

All right ladies, saddle up.

I look so professional!

(all laugh) (Abby) It has rubble piles.

It has tunnels, car garage collapses.

It is pretty much every disaster.

Disaster City is just a big mess.

(Izzie) Yikes, look at all that!

(Dr. Robin) This is one of the robots that we use for search and rescue that we're developing.

What we're going to have you guys do is try out using this robot here in the House of Pancakes.

All right, y'all ready?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, go for it.

Do it.

We're kind of playing hide-and-seek with the robot a little bit-- we're waiting for it to come and find us.

§ § It's peekin' there... That one?

Yeah.

Hey, that's doing what Jake's robot is doing.

It's lookin' for somethin'.

(Robin) Isn't it interesting how you have what's called common ground.

Because you were both looking at the same picture, when she said, see that door, you knew what you were talking about.

And that's really important.

So imagine if you were 3000 miles away trying to work together, which is what we hope to have, so that you don't have to have lots of people out in the field.

This is pretty cool.

Oh wait, I see them!

Look, they're right there!

Hello.

Hello!

People from all over come and train right here.

Hey Abby, why don't we take a group shot?

Yeah, that sounds good.Gotta go!

(Izzie) Hey, let's meet Ashley.

Hola!

I'm Ashley.

This is my church I attend.

My mom's the nursery director at Central Baptist.

I love to play sports, but my favorite is softball.

And I also have my American Girl dolls.

I love them, they're awesome.

This is my ranch.

My dad and my uncle bought it.

I think we're about done here, but I'll see y'all later.

Bye.

(Izzie) Adios, Ashley.

(Abby) Later on in the day, we went back to Robin's lab, and we brainstormed about personalities, the robot's personalities, the human's personalities, their behaviors, the robot's behaviors.

(Robin) What if it comes up to you in the dark, maybe with all those bright lights on?

If you're in this dark, enclosed space or something, and this light is shining right at you, you're like, what's going on?

Right, and the funny noises.

and you can't tell if it's coming close.

Is it coming for your face?

We began to think what if we're the victim in front of the robot, and what do we know about that?

And the term everybody uses is "creepy."

We've got a video to show you.

One of my graduate students actually did a study on how robots could creep you out, or could make you calming and more happy.

It was basically the reactions to the outgoing robot that just kind of barged up.

Does the person want the robot to zoom at them and almost hit them?

Or do they want the robot to go slow?

Or do they want it to be somewhere in the middle?

The volunteers in the video, I think definitely preferred the one that was more calm and slow.

If it was moving slowly towards me, I'll be like okay, it looks like it's taking its time trying to find something.

If it's moving fast, you think oh my gosh!

What is this coming at me?!

But if it's moving slow, you're like oh my gosh!

What is that?!

Then you have time to think, okay, well, it's not real bad.

And when you react, when you meet people for the first time, do you go (shouts) hey!, hey!, hey!?

Wouldn't that be rude?

Wouldn't that be rude?

Yeah.

You'd be like, backing up.

Personal space!

(Ashley) When we were thinking about the robot's personality, we needed to consider what we liked and what we definitely disliked.

So we wanted to give the robot human personality traits.

§ § Honestly, you don't think and realize oh, what is a robot's personality?

Yeah, you just think it's a robot.

But really, robots need personalities to get along with humans.

Yeah, you can't have the annoying-- (in monotone) please, wait, do, do this.

What ideas do you have?

Well, I think it should be friendly, but also confident, because if it was nervous, you would also kind of be like an awkward position.

But if it was more friendly, you would feel more open to it.

So that'll comfort you to know that something is there to help you.

I think we should test 2 different robots and see which one people enjoy more.

Yeah, we should have an outgoing one and a more quiet and centered one.

Yeah, we should... Split up in 2 groups.

Yeah.

Abby and Anna.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

And Lindsey and I do it.

Okay.

Whoo-hoo!

(Izzie) And now let's meet Anna.

Hey, I'm Anna.

This is my house.

This is my crazy, energetic pup Pat.

Up here are all our goats that I show, 'cause I show goats.

Score!

I have 4 ducks.

That's Snowbear, and that's Sissabear.

Hello,Mr.

Billy.

He's a billy goat!

It's time to swing!

I like to... "rock out!"

§ § Later!

So we're designing the outgoing robot, and I said we're doing that one because I'm kind of an outgoing person-- we're both kind of a little bit, so we can bring traits from ourselves and put it into our robot.

(Abby) Exactly.

How are we going to make a reserved and soft-spoken robot?

We need to think maybe the attributes of a shy person.

I definitely want it to be fun.

Maybe like, a soothing voice.

It should be definitely friendly.

What do you think about male or female?

You'd also want it to be maybe a little funny, don't you think?

I'm not sure on that one.

(Ashley) Yeah, kind of make the person feel a little comforted.

And we definitely don't want to go near the commanding voice.

Outgoing versus calm, high versus deep; I wonder which one will find a mouse?

I mean, it's no fun to have somebody bossing you around.

You'd also kind of want that trustworthy in it.

Kind of cool.

Mellow, I guess.

Yeah!

Wave real big, and if it's closer, we could have it wave real small.

So it's scaled by distance?

Yeah, movement scaled by distance.

I think that's pretty much what we need for our robot.

Yeah, sounds pretty good.

(Anna) Some of the things our outgoing robot is going to have; it's motions are going to move faster, and they're going to be more bigger and dramatic motions, and a higher-pitched voice, and it's going to speak a lot faster.

The reserved robot will have smaller motions and more calm motions, and the voice will be deeper, slower, kind of a softer voice.

Okay, so here's the deal.

We're going to start off by programming on a computer simulation.

(Abby) Robin came over with 2 computers, one for each team, the outgoing and the calm and quiet, with computer simulations, which had a model of the Survivor Buddy on there, and we had to make it do moves.

She explained on what the moves were.

Like a pitch-- a pitch is forward and backwards.

Or a translation-- a translation is shrug up, shrug down.

And a head roll was like turn to the side.

And a yaw was like you're saying no.

(Izzie) You know, Fang is sort of shy.

I wonder which one she'd like?

Let's do some small-scale movements first, and then we'll do some big scales.

Okay, definitely.

Okay.

(Lindsey) It's definitely too slow.

Do you think that was too fast or too slow or what?

I think it was a little too fast, again, it is medium, so let's try slow.

Okay, let's reset it and look at it again.

Okay.

§ § It's broken.

(both laugh) Okay, save it, save the behavior.

Keep in mind we want the 20 to 33 angle.

When we take this and put it on the real robot, it's gonna be pretty cool because it's going to be like... Like I designed that!

You know?

(Izzie) Hey Abby!

One, 2, 3, action.

Hi, I'm Abby!

My hobbies are basketball, singing, dancing, and pretty much every sport.

This is my dog Dottie.

As you can see, I like bright colors.

Say hi, old boy.

This is my mommy.

(mom) Hi Abby.

My favorite thing probably has to be the sky.

Now this is what I call a Texas sky.

Bye y'all.

Hey Victoria!

Hey you guys!

How's it going?

(Abby) Victoria is a communications PhD student at Stanford.

I am here to help you set up and run an experiment looking at robot personality.

(Anna) Victoria is more on the psychology side.

She has to think about how will this affect people, and how will this help people, and what will people think of this.

I don't design the robots, I test them.

It's always good to have a relationship with the people that design the robots, and Robin is one of those people.

Well we've tried to program these robots using simulators, but we want to try to figure it out, how to use it on humans.

Yeah, so we were thinking maybe we could invite some friends and see how they react to our robots.

Working on a team with 2 expert scientists kind of makes you feel on top of the world.

(Victoria) So what are some words that describe a likable person?

Happy.

Happy.

Comforting.

Comforting-- that's good.

(Lindsey) We came up with 6 adjectives-- friendly, scary, comforting, trustworthy, outgoing, and reserved.

We're using those adjectives on our questionnaire to see how people, on a scale, thought about the robot.

I have 6 of the friends go with the quiet, or reserved robot, and have the other 6 go with the confident and outgoing one.

Okay, yeah.

When your friends come in and they participate in the study, what exactly are they going to do?

The outgoing robot should maybe do something different from the quiet one.

What I was thinking is that if we give them the same task, we could see the differences in the task.

So we definitely want them, both the robots, to have the same task.

We could have our friends play ticktacktoe with the robots.

(Victoria) Interesting!

Do you want to go here?

"No."

Do you want to go here?

"Yes."

§ § (electronic male voice) Hello SciGirls.

I am your Survivor Buddy, and I need your help.

(with monotone robotic voice) Hello Survivor Buddy.

I am Izzie.

(Anna) I think we'd like to make the pitch a little higher.

(Victoria) Make the pitch higher?

Okay, we'll try it higher.

(Lindsey) The speech rate was kind of fast.

(Victoria) All right, so we'll do down.

(electronic voice; lower speech rate) Hello SciGirls.

I am your Survivor Buddy, and I need your help.

That was way better!

Our robot that we have designed is going to give our friends a few instructions of how to play ticktacktoe.

I think that the robot should explain to them the rules.

Since I don't have any hands, you're going to have to... You're going to have to write for me.

It was so much fun creating the script for the robot, and it was really neat how you could hear it play through the robot voice.

(female electronic voice) Since I don't have any hands, you'll have to write for me.

(voice speaks more slowly) Since I don't have any hands, you'll have to write for me.

I like it!

(Izzie) Lindsey's comin' up!

Hi, I'm Lindsey, and I play the piano.

§ § These are my dogs Sadie and Dolly.

I've been dancing for 8 years.

This is me working on my laptop.

And this is my little kitty Raja.

Gotta go.

Bye!

Whoa!

Whoa, talk about robot city!

So here's the lab, and we've got a lot of students working here today.

We've got Zach and Marco.

Hi.

Brittany.

(Abby) There are certain movements that we wanted our robot to do-- yes and no.

(female electronic voice) Yes.

(Abby) So that was the yes for the soft-spoken robot.

(Izzie) Aw.

(robot) Yes.

(Abby) This is the yes for the more outgoing robot.

So this is our sad for our outgoing robot.

(female electronic voice) You win.

I lose again.

(Anna) It's going to do a transition down.

And then you pitch forward.

Ready?

(man) I'm sorry about this.

(Robin) Well, it started to look sad.

(SciGirls chuckle) Yeah.

Slightly.

(Abby) With robots you definitely hit some bumps.

It's kind of like a computer.

Sometimes it's going to shut down, and you're just like why won't you work with me?!

(Lindsey) Whenever problems come up, I think we just have to keep going forward and move on to something else and come back to it later, so that we can figure out the problem then.

(man) It went from green to red.

What does red on that mean?

(2nd man) I don't think it's good.

(Izzie) It's a good thing the SciGirls are here!

(Abby) Hey guys, let's hang up some signs so people know where to go.

(Ashley) Got some tape.

Today is test day, we're going to test out how people and robots interact with each other.

(Robin) We're going to move the robot in.

So here's our mission control.

(Abby) Mission control has a big TV with our data cam.

We have our robot cam, the computer that controls the voice of the robot, and we have the computer that controls the behaviors of the robot.

(Robin) Let's try it like this.

Can you at least see the board now?

(SciGirls) Yeah, we can see it.

We're just trying to hustle and get everything ready for our friends.

Hi.

Hello.

(man) ...see the problem; I think there's a crack.

(Abby) There are a few bugs in the robot.

There's something going wrong.

It's jamming in the motions.

Instead of 12 people, which we originally thought of, we have 14.

Hey guys, can I have your attention up here?

Okay, we're going to split you all up into 2 groups just for testing, and so we're going to have you pick out of here to see if you're group 1 or group 2.

They've been waiting for around 45 minutes, so we really need to get it up-and-running so we can start the interactions.

§ § Don't say technical difficulties or anything like that.

I'm just going to say thanks for waiting and being so patient.

Sorry for the delay.

Yeah, the robot, and we're about to start in 10 minutes.

We're going to start in the next 10 minutes.

We're going to start pretty soon because we don't want them to have the time because they're going to be like, oh my gosh, they're even more late than they said.

Let's just go in there and... Yeah, say what we need to say.

Thank you all for being so patient and waiting, and we should start sometime in the next 10 minutes.

Pretty soon, so just hold on, and we're about to start.

Hopefully the bugs will be worked out.

I'm hoping that they will, maybe.

Yeah.

(Izzie) Yeah, bugs, robots-- they don't go together.

(Robin) Can you hear us now?

Robin just gave us some bad news.

We are not going to be able to do our movements.

Even though our behaviors and stuff really can't go, we still have our voice.

So our robot will still talk to the person.

We are having technical difficulties with the robot, nothing is working, and we can't even be in another room.

(Robin) We lost Skype again?

We have to be in the testing room with our friends.

I'll do the computer.

And it was just like how are we going to do this?

So we moved some desks together, stuck some chairs in front of the desks, and we hid, and it went pretty good from there.

(Izzie) SciGirls to the rescue!

You can come stand over here by the whiteboard.

(Anna) Our friends had already been waiting for 2 hours, so Abby came up with the brilliant idea; how about we do them in a few groups?

We already had a group 1 and group 2 to test the reserved and the outgoing.

We split them up into pairs.

It took half the time, so it really cut down on our time issue.

(female electronic robot's voice) Will you draw a ticktacktoe game and sign the box on the dry erase board?

You will be "X's" and I will be "O's."

Go ahead and go.

(Anna) To see how our friends interact with the robot, it was a little weird at first because they were kind of freaked out, they didn't know what to do.

They all had weird expressions on their face.

(robot) Good game, it was nice to meet you.

Please erase the ticktacktoe board and head back through the door.

Bye!

Bye.

§ § What you'll do-- at the top it says rate how well the following words fit the robot.

You're either going to check "not at all," or "extremely."

If it was neither of those, check one of the boxes in the middle.

(robot) Good game.

It was nice to meet you.

Please erase the ticktacktoe board and head back through the door.

Bye.

(Izzie) Bye-bye Survivor Buddy!

Nice playin' ticktacktoe with ya.

(Abby) To handle whenever you have a difficulty with a robot is find what's wrong with it, and let's think of another way to go.

Hey guys, we are all finished!

(Abby) These are all for you.

(man) Oh thank you.

(Abby) They go to all of you.

(staff) Thank you.

(Abby) Now that our test is done, everybody is coming over to my house, and we're going to sit there, and this is where we're going to make our graphs and analyze all of our data and get what we can from it.

If you guys could, for each of your friends that you brought in, give your own rating of your perception of how outgoing and how reserved they are.

And we can also look at which group they were paired in with the robot, and then we can maybe draw some conclusions about whether indeed in this case, the more outgoing people preferred the more outgoing robot, and the more reserved people preferred the more reserved robot.

So of the 14 participants we had, 5 were outgoing, 5 were reserved, and 4 of them were equally outgoing and reserved.

We thought the reserved people were going to like the reserved robot; we thoughtthe outgoing people were going to like the outgoing robot.

(Izzie) Outgoing, reserved; I wonder which one Fang would like?

(Abby) I'm adding everyone's scary, friendly, trustworthy, outgoing, reserved and comforting-- all of those numbers.

I'm totaling them up, and I'm averaging them.

Reserved, the average is 2.4.

A lot more of the people enjoyed the outgoing robot rather than the reserved.

Because out of the 14, 9 of them liked the outgoing one, and only 5 liked the reserved one.

The outgoing people did like the outgoing robot, but most of the reserved people did too.

I'm really glad that, over here on the far left side on our graph, the scary, I'm glad that that's down real low and that the friendly is really high.

Along with trustworthy and comforting, they're pretty high.

Yeah, trustworthy is also real high.

This was a once- in-a-lifetime experience.

This is something that you probably won't be able to get to do again.

You did all the work.

We were learning from you guys, and you've gotten useful results for us.

(Ashley) So right now, we're about to say good-bye to Robin and Victoria.

They're so good at what they do, and it's sad to say good-bye because they were so much fun too.

Working with these robots, it's so amazing.

And I was so happy to have this experience with all my friends.

2, 3, robots!

So did you make the car look less scary like I told you?

Yup.

Let's see what happens.

(loud whirr of the car's electric motor) (loud shriek) Argh!

It's not working!

Well, Jake, what did you make the car look like?

Jake!

What?!

Cats are cute and cuddly!

(laughs) Not if you're a mouse, they're not.

Oh, right.

What if I made it look like a clown?

Yeah, no clowns.

They scare me too.

You gotta think like a mouse, Jake-- what do they like?

I am the mouse; chomp, chomp, chomp, chomp.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Oh!

Oh, oh, oh, oh, I know.

Ta-dah!

A cheesemobile.

Perfect!

Yeah, now let's see if it works.

Here we go!

(loud whirr of the car's electric motor) (Izzie) Oh, oh, reverse, reverse!

(motor whirrs) Oh Fang, I missed you, buddy!

Thanks for helping, Iz.

Ah well, don't thank me, thank the SciGirls!

Don't know why, but I'm suddenly hungry for some Cheesy Cheesier Puffs.

(laughs) Me too!