Are you looking at me? Domestic robots could be controlled by online workers. Will we invite strangers on the internet into our homes?

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Are you looking at me? 
Domestic robots could be controlled by online workers. Will we 
invite strangers on the internet into our homes?
In 2012, researchers at Silicon Valley robotics start-up Willow Garage 
thought they had the ideal solution for tidying their messy office. They 
would pay online workers to control humanoid PR2 robots remotely, 
cleaning up empty mugs and dirty dishes at the end of each day.
The robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on 
the other side. People got uncomfortable. 
Willow Garage’s experiment, however, lasted less than a month. Instead 
of welcoming their cybernetic cleaners, employees were creeped out. “The 
robots would look at you and you’d have no idea who was on the other 
side,” recalls Maya Cakmak, then an intern at the company. “People got 
really uncomfortable.”
Now an assistant professor of robotics at the University of Washington in 
Seattle, Cakmak is trying again. By obscuring personal items in the video 
feed seen by the cleaning robot’s operator, she may have found 
a way to keep everyone happy.

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Domestic robots are set to be a big deal. Industry analysts WinterGreen 
Research, based in Lexington, Massachusetts, predict that home cleaning 
robots will become a market worth $2.6 billion by 2020. But Willow 
Garage found human- controlled robots to be much more effective than 
the fully automatic vacuuming robots available at the time. And at just $6 
an hour through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service, they 
were also a bargain.
But what is it like for those on the other side of the camera? “Workers 
on a platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk have very limited rights,” 
says Niloufar Salehi, who studies digital labour at Stanford University. 
“
They’re notsubjecttominimumwage, can get their account deactivated at 
any time or not get paid without any legal ramifications. They’re on their 
own.” For many, though, the risks will be worth it.
Willow Garage’s team made plans to spin out the technology as a business 
– connecting domestic robots to “digital immigrant” workers around the 
world. The creepiness factor put those plans on hold.
Cakmak’s fix, though, makes the idea viable again. This autumn, she 
deployed a PR2 robot in a private home in Arizona. To address the 
creepiness, Cakmak used digital filters in the video
feed from the robot’s camera to hide certain things in the robot’s field of 
view from its operator.
To design a filter, she presented a panel of people with images 
of everyday objects, from the relatively innocuous, such as keys and an 
unmade bed, to the personal, such as credit cards and pregnancy test kits. 
The panel rated how comfortable they would be with digitally treated 
version of those images being shown to online workers. 
The most privacy-preserving filter was an algorithm that pixelated parts 
of an image and added false colours to obscure brands and logos. Cakmak 
then put her filter to the test. She applied it to the video feed of a PR2 
robot and tasked teleoperators to tidy up a table. The operators were 
then asked whether they could identify objects like political literature or 
medication.
Users seeing the filtered view tidied the same number of objects as those 
with untreated video, but were much less likely to recognise the objects 
they had moved. “It makes everything more abstract,” says Cakmak. “Your 
house doesn’t seem like your house anymore, it seems like any house.”

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The filter also works for autonomous robots with cameras. If images are 
later accessed, it could be just as intrusive as real- time human snoopers.
Bill Smart at Oregon State University in Corvallis is also looking at 
telerobotic privacy. Smart has built a system for unskilled remote 
operators to change bed sheets using a PR2. But rather than blurring the 
entire image, Smart lets homeowners specify 3D areas to censor, say a 
bedside table, where operators will simply see a black space. He has also 
developed physical privacy markers: a mat that automatically erases 
anything placed on it, and a hat that renders its wearer invisible in the 
robot’s video feed.
And Savioke, a robotics company headed by Steve Cousins, formerly CEO 
of Willow Garage, has launched SaviOne, a robotic butler that delivers 
room service items to hotel guests. “Privacy is an issue,” says Cousins. 
“
SaviOne doesn’t go into people’s private hotel rooms. It stays in the 
hallway, a public space where you can’t really have an expectation of a 
lot of privacy.”
When it comes to our homes, though, we have to get privacy right, says 
Smart. “Otherwise it’s goingtobeatrainwreck.”