Robot Census Taker Heather Knight Finds a Growing Population

(Oct. 12) -- New Carnegie Mellon University graduate student Heather Knight just wanted to get to know some of the robots on campus. What she found was a population explosion.

It turns out robots at the university outnumbered the people creating them. Knight counted 547 robots compared with several hundred faculty and students working on robotics at the Pittsburgh school. And her count doesn't include robots at an off-campus, government-sponsored lab. "I was really shocked that the number was so high," Knight told AOL News in an interview.

Knight describes herself as a "social roboticist." She runs the Marilyn Monrobot Lab in New York City, and is pursuing a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon. Her work on the census began in August when she started her doctorate program.

"The original point of doing the census was an excuse to meet the great robots," she said.

Now, through a robot census Twitter feed and her website, Knight is reaching out to count robots on a national scale. She is attracting interest from robot makers on other campuses, as well as commercial robot makers interested in participating in the count, but she's not far enough along yet to have even preliminary numbers..

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Beyond shock value, Knight sees the census as a way to find out what work is going in the robotics field, and her interest in the census goes beyond just numbers. There are, she points out, some good statistics about commercial robots, but much less information about the noncommercial side, particularly robots that people have built at home.

Not unlike a human census, the results prompted other interesting questions about the makeup of the robot population. "It's interesting to find out if people regard their robots as individuals," she said. "Do people name their robots? Why do they have these robots? Is there an ethnography of robots?"

And the census itself is a metaphor for human-robot interactions, Knight pointed out. "You're humanizing technology," she said.