A Demonstration with Humanoids and Drones to Overcome the Wow Effect

THE LESSON BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE SCHOOL OF ROBOTICS, AT THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION LABORATORY OF SDA BOCCONI RUN BY GIANLUCA SALVIOTTI, TELLS ABOUT THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF NAO AND ITS COLLEAGUES

In the industrious silence of the corridors of the SDA Bocconi School of Management, the hit Gangnam Style by Psy suddenly resounds. The music comes from the desk of room 14, where all 58 centimeters of Nao, a humanoid robot produced by SoftBank Robotics, are dancing – and rather well.

A very amusing scene, but it is anything but a joke. That robotic exhibition is the preamble to a lesson covering very serious topics in the Digital Transformation course held by Gianluca Salviotti as part of the Microsoft Dynamics Academy, a collaboration between SDA Bocconi and the American company. On that day the course welcomed a witness to the most advanced experiences of interaction between man and machine, the president of the School of robotics based in Genoa, Emanuele Micheli.

After the music of Nao’s demo mode, everything becomes terribly serious. At stake " is the way in which technologies are changing every aspect of our lives", explains Micheli. "Because it is true that those who make robotics are interested initially that robots like Nao or Pepper create engagement, but then you need to find uses for them, otherwise they remain only expensive gadgets". This is why Emanuele, his school and anyone who shares this vision, immediately try to go beyond the wow effect produced by the robot or the videos of the ping pong champion who was almost beaten by a Kuka robotic arm, to touch the implications that all this entails.

Therefore, when the demonstration is over, the lesson quickly gets down to business. That means looking at aspects of robotics linked to privacy and security (the reference to what happened to the self-driving Uber car is inevitable), but above all those related to ethics and to the social role of robots. "Very promising trials are underway regarding the use of humanoids in hospitals", Micheli continues. "Small-sized robots like Nao are proving to be useful as an interface in certain cases. For example, to teach diabetic children how to manage their illness, considering their appearance is more similar to a child, but also to lower a child’s level of preoperative stress. Moreover, they could be useful to create a bridge of communication with autistic people, and we are working in this direction too.”

The same objective of overcoming the surprise effect is at the base of the Digital Transformation course, that Gianluca Salviotti also leads in other training activities coming from within SDA Bocconi's Devo Lab: "We analyze the clusters that enable digital transformation processe, ranging from artificial intelligence and the Internet of things to 3D printing, robotics and virtual reality," explains the professor. "We are thus breaking away from a number of clichés about what we can and cannot do in robotics, and we also discuss regulatory aspects. All these factors push students to reflect in depth on digital transformation and help them understand how much, in reality, the human factor counts. "

But when four drones fly up in class to simulate a search for survivors, programmed by the students themselves via tablet, the wow effect returns to the fore. But it doesn’t last long, because the message of this somewhat unusual workshop-lesson is strong and clear: technology is changing what we can do much more quickly than we imagine,  and we must be ready to manage its innumerable implications. Which, translated for companies, means not being caught unprepared: "Otherwise you end up like Blockbuster", concludes Emanuele Micheli, "who at the beginning of the 2000s underestimated the business of a small company that delivered films by post. That company was Netflix ".
 

by Andrea Celauro
Translated by Richard Greenslade