A few years ago, while on a trip to California, my coworkers and I visited the offices of one of the few other companies in the medical robotics field. The company makes a telepresence robot--a doctor operates it with a joystick and a webcam, and the robot moves while showing an image of the doctor's face on its screen, with a camera on its head that shows the doctor what the robot is seeing. The executives of the company were incredibly generous and friendly with us. They came out in the evening to show us their shop and give us great business advice.

At one point I realized that I had no idea what their product was called, and asked them. They said that internally they call it the RP6, for Remote Presence version 6, but that they try not to emphasize that with customers, because they want customers to name their own robots. They also talked about an alternate scheme that they had either thought about or used in the past, in which the product's name became either a first name or a last name, with the customer supplying the other piece. This had advantages for things like repairs or communicating over a network with multiple robots--it's easier for humans to deal with than a serial number.

I thought this approach was clever and bold. I also thought about the potential dangers of it. It's a given that sometimes, people outside the company will have to talk about the product, and not a particular physical instance of the product. What will they call it? Well, in one case, the robot was featured on a news show. They featured a particular robot in use at a hospital in New Jersey, and used the nickname the staff had given it, "Mr. Rounder", referring to the doctor's use of it to do their rounds without leaving the office. How many people now think that's the name of the product? Probably not that many, because it was not a national newscast. But my coworkers and I have since referred to it that way in conversation, simply because it was suddenly the easiest thing to do.

Another dimension of this is that the robot is channeling the presence of a person. It's a pass-through device. So how much personality should the robot itself really have? Obviously it still has some, more than a mere immobile LCD screen used for video-conferencing would have. Yet you wouldn't say you talked to Mr. Rounder today, you would say, perhaps, that you talked to the doctor on Mr. Rounder.

I finally got around to writing this because of this article in the Washington Post, about the emotional relationships soldiers develop with the robots being used on the battlefield. It's interesting to note that this happens even with machines that are really just remote-controlled devices, some of them not dissimilar to the RP6, except that they get blown up routinely (the article glosses over that fact to some degree in trying to make everything sound super high-tech). As frequently occurs in stressful circumstances, superstition is a part of it: "We always wanted him as our main robot. Every time he was working, nothing bad ever happened." It reminds me that allowing users to ascribe a personality to a machine with their imagination, whether it's a toy, a tool or a weapon, is almost always a more powerful technique than trying to build your own idea of the personality into its design.