This week I spoke to Ben Knight at the UNSW Newsroom, to share my thoughts on whether we might be able to expect robotic pets to become more widespread in the near future. This discussion seems particularly pertinent now, given that for many of us, we are not able to experience the social interactions and relationships that we were pre-Covid. The question is, could a robotic pet fulfil some of these relationships in the meantime?
Dr Belinda Dunstan was also quoted in the piece, and went on to speak further with John Stanley about the topic on 2GB radio. Belinda and I did our PhDs alongside one another in the Creative Robotics Lab, where Belinda focused on social robot morphologies before moving to the School of Built Environment.