Imperfections
Robots are becoming more and more important in our society, with the developments in artificial intelligence they are starting to become more humanlike.
Perhaps we should design the robots in such a way that they have the ability to express imperfections.
BERT2
According to the study of Adriana Hamacher, people prefer more expressive communicative robots instead of efficient and effective ones. In this experiment the robot assists by handing over the ingredients when preparing an omlette. The robot intentionally drops one of the eggs and then apologizes to the user. Even tough this takes a considerably longer time to complete the task, users preferred a more humanlike robot which makes mistakes.
Erwin
The following study is similar, two robots were intentionally making mistakes. During a conversation Erwin the robot would ask the participant the following: “Last time you were wearing a yellow shirt, am I correct?”. The participant then disagreed and Erwin would respond as follows: “I am sorry that I have forgotten that, but I don't have true sense of colour perception. Next time I will be more careful though”. The results of this study show that the participants felt more intimate with the robots when they made mistakes and showed imperfections.
Both examples show that people can bond better with imperfect robots, while the general trend focuses more on efficiency.
I think it would be interesting to enlarge this property because robots are often seen as perfect and emotionless, making it hard to empathize with them.
I have not been able to find projects which apply this outside of a academic context in a more playful manner, perhaps this will inspire you to get started with this element.