We all love Data and his quest to be more human. It makes us feel special as human beings that he would hold us in such high esteem. Watching the early episodes of Next Gen, I notice that it’s his quirky pre-programmed mannerisms, speech patterns & movements that seem to initiate this quest. In one episode he talks about a randomizing algorithm that controls his blinking so he will fit in better and put humans interacting with him at ease. It’s just these kinds of things that scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology are starting to think about while working on the latest robots.

“It’s important to build robots that meet people’s social expectations because we think that will make it easier for people to understand how to approach them and how to interact with them,” said Andrea Thomaz

“So, instead of having the robot move the exact same way every single time you want the robot to perform a similar action like waving, you always want to see a different wave so that people forget that this is a robot they’re interacting with,” said Gielniak.

Score another point for Star Trek. I bet if Data’s quest to be human hadn’t been so clearly defined and explored on Next Gen we would have had robots in our daily life for many years before anyone would’ve thought to make them seem more relatable.

Check out a video clip below.

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