Sooo annoying
Annoyance
Everyone can be a little annoying sometimes. But can everyone be annoyed? Us humans can get annoyed by many things but I would not be so sure about robots.
You see, being annoyed is a natural but irrational thing. We usually get annoyed because something or someone is keeping us from reaching our goal: we cannot focus because of a noise, we cannot pass through because someone blocking our way or we cannot get somewhere in time because somebody else is very slow.
Robots and setbacks
Robots are programmed to do specific things. They are following orders. In case of a setback or a disruption, they would simply wait for a situation where they can continue doing their job. They can do so by waiting until the disruption is over, or by taking action: "This street is blocked by a car? No problem, I'll just move around this entire block so I can continue."
Since robots are programmed to follow orders, in case of a disruption they would just wait and continue when the situation improves. No hard feelings.
Training AI
When training the neural network of an artificial intelligence robot, there is a technique where the neural network gets a 'score' everytime it tries to do an action right. I am no expert on artifical intelligence, but I believe it works something like this: imagine we try to teach a neural network to draw a dog. If it draws a dog with only 3 legs, it would receive less points than if it would draw 4 legs. This method is called reinforcement learning. The robot is being rewarded or punished, based on its behavior.
The goal of the neural network is to receive as many points as possible, so you could argue that in a way, the robot would not be very 'pleased' when making mistakes.
Useless Machine
Nevertheless, robots cannot feel anything. Especially not annoyance, since they are so rational. I wanted to share this video with you of a 'useless machine': a machine you may have already heard about. Someone improved the code for this useless machine in such a way that it almost seems like it is getting really annoyed by the fact that somebody constantly pushes its button!
My robot
I do not think that I could create a robot that could actually become annoyed by something. The mere fact that a robot just tries to follow orders and only if they are possible, makes it hard to annoy a robot by keeping it from reaching its goal.
What I really like about the video above, is that the maker insinuates that the robot has feelings, only using motion! The useless machine does not say a word, nor does he have a face. Yet, you can clearly see that the robot is very irritated. It is almost like the robot is expressing it using body language, but it does not even have a real body. It is just a box! Very clever.
So if I were to create an annoyable robot, I would definitely use some sort of body language to express this feeling. Also, I would really focus on the expression of annoyance rather than the actual experience of annoyance by the robot.
My robot would probably:
Have some form of interaction
This way, people could trigger the robot and feel like they are causing the robot's annoyance themselves. (Like the button on the useless machine.)
Maybe an animal-shaped robot whose tail you can pull, or a small, driving robot who's path you can block using your hand.Express their emotion more and more
The aggression of the response increases every time the robot is triggered, to make it more realistic. You would not be super mad the first time somebody is blocking your path, right? But after 5 times you will start to get pretty angry.Have explicit features
Thick eyebrows to express facial expressions, or a wagging tail (like an angry cat), or a hand so it can make gestures or do a facepalm.