Generic Blog Post 1

“Mechanical Presence” was a phrase I picked years ago that would roughly describe my professional work. It is not perfectly apt. I tried to ask chatgpt for advice on alternative phrases. We hit upon “sensorimotor presence” but this sounds too much like motor neuroscience. What I wanted was to describe a general endeavor of making robot-human interaction more engaged. It should be engaged from the perspective of the robot, in that it tries to form a representation of what the human is trying to do, and it should be create engagement for the human by creating affordances that allow the individual to have better situational awareness and even allow opportunities for motor learning and skill acquisition. What I want from the phrase mechanical presence is asking too much, but in any case I am stuck with it for perhaps personal historical reasons.