A Robot, Slave or Companion Species

A Robot, Slave or Companion Species?

The naming practices and culture of robotics competitions

Andra Keay

Masters Candidate, Digital Cultures

University of Sydney

22 June 2011


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Abstract

The naming of robots bears witness to their emergence as a new ontological category,

birthed in robotics competitions, forming a laboring companion species. This thesis is the result

of a sociological survey into the naming practices of competition robots, informed by my auto-

ethnographic research into the culture of robot competitions. Many interesting names and

connections appeared. Most robots in competitions were named and gendered as well. Names

reflected human/machine hybridity, as well as anthropomorphism. The names demonstrate

interesting levels of ‘subjectification’ in even the least anthropomorphic or lifelike of robots.

Overall, this data supports the ‘robot as a new ontological category’ hypothesis (Kahn Jr.

et al), and further poses the questions, how does this come about and what does that mean?

Donna Haraway has made interspecies translation her specialty and so I knit this investigation of

a new being becoming into her ‘cats cradle’ with both factual and fictional robots.

My conclusion is that robot naming in competitions is a performance of companion

species co-shaping in the contact zone between organic/technic, master/slave and subject/object,

supporting the ‘robots as new ontological category’ hypothesis. Robot naming demonstrates

human-robot social relationships and both slave, pet and hybrid naming characteristics. My

thesis suggests that competitions function as a birth rite of passage, and that naming dubs or

introduces the new being to the world and brings the world into the robot.

KEYWORDS: Human-Robot Interaction, Social Theory, Cultural Theory, Onomastics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Becoming a New Being 2

Introduction 2 New Ontological Category Hypothesis 4

The ‘Birth’ of a Robot in Competition 10

Rites of Passage 10 Robot Competitions 15 Rituals of Birth 21

The Original Question; Gender or Name? 25

Some Theories of Naming 25 Case Study: Grey Walter’s Tortoises 37 Case Study: Poppy Da Vinci 40

Robot Name Survey 43

Purpose 43 Method 45 Results 52 Discussion 62

Slave or Companion Species? 64

Laboring in the Uncanny Valley 64 Contact Zones and Other Languages 70 From Kin to Kind, a small conclusion 74

References 77

Appendixes 88

Included Tables 88 Additional Tables 92


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Becoming a New Being

Introduction

The naming of robots bears witness to their emergence as a new ontological category,

birthed in robotics competitions, forming a laboring companion species. As a cultural theorist

interested in human-robot interfaces, I take threads from many disciplines and find interest in the

ordinary. As Ien Ang suggests (2011): “‘Culture’ is integral to and constitutive of social life, not

something outside of or a mere addition to it.”

This thesis is the result of a sociological survey into the naming practices of competition

robots, informed by my auto-ethnographic research into the culture of robot competitions at

schools and universities. My initial motivation for studying the naming of robots was to find

reasons for the gendering of engineering (Cockburn 1999a, 1999b), which is curiously resistant

to female penetration, by analyzing signs of gender in the engineered objects, the robots, or Lucy

Suchman’s (2009) model (in)organisms. In following a grounded theory research methodology

(Bryman 2008), my thesis was formed after the initial data collection.

Robot names in competitions appeared to be a useful fulcrum by which to lever meaning

out of the raw scientific field of robot research. Many interesting names and attributes appeared,

worth following up with stronger experimental or quantitative research. For instance, the

majority of robots in competitions were named and many robots were gendered as well. Names

reflected human/machine hybridity, as well as anthropomorphism. The names demonstrate

interesting levels of ‘subjectification’ using Foucault’s term (1985), in even the least

anthropomorphic or lifelike of robots. Some specific details emerged, within gendered names,


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the male robots are both more dominating and more talkative than the female robots and size

does appear to contribute to the personification of a robot.

Overall, this data supports the ‘robot as a new ontological category’ hypothesis (Kahn Jr.

et al), and further poses the questions, how does this come about and what does that mean?

Robots are used to model human, but the differences can create an endlessly recursive error, a

strange loop (Hofstadter 2007). Donna Haraway has made interspecies translation her specialty

and so I knit this investigation of a new being becoming into her ‘cats cradle’ both figuratively

and methodologically. My companions in this thesis, alongside many factual and fictional robots,

are Heidegger’s being, Hegel’s slave, Suchman’s model (in)organisms, Bourdieu’s scientific

field, Groy’s archive, Davis-Floyd’s birth rituals, Kripke’s dubbing, Searle’s indefinite speech

acts, Althussers interpellation, Chesher’s invocation, Corazza’s anaphora, Barthe’s image,

Latour’s Great Divides, Pratt’s contact zones, Derrida’s animot and Haraway’s worlding.






introduces the new being to the world and vice versa. This thesis has come from khora to

anaphora, from slave to companion, from regard to respect and perhaps from kin to kind.


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New Ontological Category Hypothesis

Classical ontology is the definition of basic categories of being. ‘The new ontological

category hypothesis in human-robot interaction’ put forward at the 2011 conference on Human-

Robot Interaction by a group which includes roboticists Hiroshi Ishiguro, Takayuki Kanda and

psychologist Peter Kahn Jr, is that the attributes that people ascribe to robots do not mirror

reasoning about canonical living entities such as humans, non-human animals, or artifacts. This

leads to the hypothesis of an emerging new ontological category “alive/not alive” to distinguish

robots from other beings (Kahn Jr et al. 2011). This builds on the earlier work of Turkle (1984),

and Reeves & Nass (1996), who have found that humans consistently respond to computers as

‘alive/not alive’ in a way that differs to all our previous experience. Living and not living are

canonical categories that even young children consistently identify and yet robots cannot be

clearly placed in one or the other (Kahn Jr et al. 2011).

Leila Takayama describes this difference between what we do and what we think as ‘in-

the-moment’ reaction and ‘reflective’ cognition (2011). We are consciously aware that the

machine is not biological or alive but we behave as if it is. Her phenomenological stance is that

the ontological category is not important. Actions and reactions are all that can be known. Kahn

Jr et al. (2011) use phenomenology to support the ‘weak’ ontological position, “if it walks like a

duck”, rather than the ‘strong’ ontological position as described by Searle (1980), who argues in

his Chinese Room paradigm for an actual being, even if it is not knowable. The increasingly

embodied and autonomous qualities of robotic systems provide a discrete peg on which to hang

the new ontological category hat. The definition of robot here is a human or animal-like robot by

virtue of body, mobility, autonomy or social role, rather than a computer or robotic system that is

distributed, disguised, multi-purposed and discreet.


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The survey of robot names in competitions shows many hybrid names that marry the

categories of alive and machine, human and non-human, e.g. Elbot, Robo-goat and MikeRobot.

This supports the NOC or ‘new ontological category’ hypothesis. Kahn Jr et al (2011) suggest

that the new ontological category is emergent, and this emerging quality is supported by the

proportion of hybrid names compared to other names in the robot names survey. While some

robot names clearly display hybrid ontology, many more robots are named in ways which

display ‘torque’, Bowker and Star’s term for the tectonic plates of conflicting categories

(1999:27-28 cited in Haraway 2008:134). Many robot names express full personification even in

highly mechanical forms of robot and competition, or full mechanization even in highly social

forms of robot and competition. This is indicative of the lack of tradition of robot naming, and

supports the emerging NOC hypothesis as necessarily liminal, a work in progress. These fault

lines may be intriguing contact zones of future study, for example, what role does gender or size

play in the human-robot competition partnership?

The opposition to robots as a new ontological category is primarily grounded in the

western philosophical separation of subject and object, in which subject trumps object by means

of biology, sentience, cognition, knowing, intention, feeling and power. Tellingly, humans also

still have trouble granting equal subject status to other humans, let alone non-human actors or

artifactual ones. Jacques Derrida saw the question of the animal, or animal-machine as

fundamental to the construction of the western philosophical subject, speaking for 10 days at

Cerisy in 1997 on ‘The Autobiographical Animal’, his deconstruction of the inherently

logocentric ‘Cartesian tradition of the animal-machine without language and without response’

(2008:119 cited in Haraway 2008:306). Critically, Derrida did not just engage with philosophy,

he encountered his cat:


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Derrida felt a presence, something that had a unique material existence and an individual

relation with him. The key question Derrida identified in ‘And Say the Animal Responded’

(2008:126), an excerpt from Cerisy, is not can a cat speak, think or feel, but how can anything

know what constitutes a response and then how to respond accordingly, ethically and logically.

Haraway extends the implications of Derrida’s insight to all companion species, both animal and

artifactual, in ‘When Species Meet’ (2008), her post-phenomenological ark full of material-

semiotic things, hybrids and cyborgs, companion species, kind and kin in mutually constituted

relations. She weaves a cats cradle of fellow travellers together, Freud, Marx, Derrida, Latour,

Suchman, Barad, Ihde, Thompson, Smutts, even Deleuze and Guattari. My thesis refers both to

these original works and to Haraway’s interpretations.

Haraway’s philosophy of encounters and becomings is particularly apt for analysis of

robot competitions, an emergent ontology seen phenomenologically. Having extended being to

all things via Latour’s pragmatic things as ‘material, specific, non-self-identical and semiotically

active’ (2005, cited in Haraway 2008:250), she contends that the smallest unit of being is

therefore the relation. Robot competitions consist of many pairs or teams of human-robot

“The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me,

a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the

room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that

traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables.” (1997, 2008:6

cited in Haraway 2008:19)


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partnerships working with and against each other. The robots are not figures or allegories but

unique specific actual robots. The partnerships do not pre-exist the entangled semiotic-material

encounters. Neither partner can function in this arena without each other. Although the power

and autonomy is inequitably distributed, the robot is not completely under the control of the

human partners. Every robot competition is full of stories of deviations from the plan, some

successful, some not. In ‘Human-Machine Reconfigurations’, Lucy Suchman (2007) describes

plans as explanations for what actually happened, or was intended to happen. Rather than a plan

being a set of steps leading to an action, they are stories or rhetorical devices for communicating

situations and goals. Plans are not performed, but a performance may occasionally go to plan. As

Haraway says of her companion species, ‘actual encounters are what make beings; this is the

ontological choreography’ described by Charis Thompson (2005, cited in Haraway 2008:67).

The secondary objection to acceding ontological status to robots is the authenticity of the

social relations we engage in with them, perhaps more so with robots than to any other category-

in-question. According to Sherry Turkle (2006), the first debate in robotics was the degree of

intelligence that was possible. As both the debate and robot intelligence and sophistication have

evolved, the issue has become one of authenticity, whether or not human-robot relations can be

real or are founded upon deception. As Coekelbergh (2011a) points out, this is paradoxical. If

robots do not provide a strong ‘quasi-other’ experience, then they cannot deceive (2011a:200).

As in the Turing test, the ability to deceive is an indication of actual ontological success.

Deception need not be intentional, or even intelligent. As social creatures, we engage in social

relations with robots regardless. That the majority of robots in robot competitions have been

given names supports the sneaky success of human-robot social relations in what Nass et al.

(1994) called the ‘Computers as Social Actors’ theory.


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Finally, the argument that robots are a new ontological category rests not just on the

dissolution of the human exceptionalism criteria and the evidence of actual social relations, but

on the emergent nature of both the category and the robots. A robot is neither a stable entity nor a

fixed species. While the stability and speciesness of all beings can be called into question, the

evolution of ‘robot’ is significantly rapid. In the 1990s, Kismet was constructed as one of a new

class of socially intelligent autonomous robots, designed to change. Kismet’s control architecture

facilitates social forms of learning that ‘enables Kismet to influence its social world to maintain

its internal agenda’ (Breazeal 1999). An increasing number of robots are constructed to have

goals involving interaction with humans. Social performance is one of the tested categories at

robot competitions. Changing categories in competitions reflect robot evolution.

Our robot building skills are improving. Although Ishiguro’s Geminoids are almost

human in some ways, they trail a lengthy evolutionary tail. Small robots that self assemble,

chatbots and virtual agents who converse, mobile household toys which work and robots who

learn are taking all sorts of shapes around us. This potential was described by Donna Haraway in

‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985, 1991:152):


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This is a specific tale of the agility team that is robot and engineer(s) performing a

partnership in robot competitions, as witnessed by name and category records. This is an

emergent relationship with a new being or ‘thing’ (Latour 2005). This is a process of birth and it

is attended by ritual as all life crises are in human society. Robotics competitions are one of the

mechanisms or rituals of this emergent form. Participation in competitions is an important rite of

passage for robots in validating their construction/ideal/ontology.

Figure 1. University of NSW ‘2 Legged League’ RoboCup team from 2008.

“Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous

the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-

developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used

to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively,

and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”


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The ‘Birth’ of a Robot in Competition

Rites of Passage

Sociologists and anthropologists since Durkheim have studied the major life transitions

that are ritualized in rites of passage. Birth, puberty, marriage and death are known as the ‘life-

crisis rites’ (Turner 1969). These rites highlight and validate changes in a person’s status and are

characterized by three stages, separation, transition, and reincorporation (Van Gennep 1909).

The stages are not equal, dependent on the occasion. Birthing rites focus on liminal transition

and introduction. Liminality is a period of ambiguity characterized by tests. Robot competitions

function as a rite of passage, transforming an undetermined entity to a categorized entry aiming

at the successful completion of categorical imperatives.

Birth is an obvious metaphor for the emergence of new ontological category, but the birth

of a robot faces several obstacles. Firstly, the technical trespasses on the essentially natural,

where birth is a product of flesh and blood. The second obstacle is the modeling of human that

underpins the creation of these model (in)organisms (Suchman in press). Finally, the gendering

of technological relations has a tradition of women’s work being appropriated by male hands, so

giving birth to robots risks trivializing the role of women and extracting the surplus value from

the labor of production.

The first argument can be countered both philosophically and pragmatically. For

example, Suchman (in press) argues that the human/machine divide is ‘no more an a priori than

that between human and animal’, leveraging recent theories in ANT, feminism and

posthumanism. Also, in praxis, robots are being created to model ‘human’ therefore birth is a


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fitting figuration. “The robot can serve as a model for the Human insofar as its existence is

framed as elucidating universally applicable truths about how humans work.” (Suchman in

press). In ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing (1950: 456 cited by Suchman in

press p17) proposed juvenile robots instead of adult models, suggesting that a child’s brain could

then be educated appropriately into an adult. Since then child-like learning robots have

proliferated, from Kismet and Mertz, to Asimo and iCub.

Suchman and Keller (2007 cited by Suchman in press) both point out the circular logic

inherent in this common rationale behind building robots, in which the ability to reproduce

human behaviors is taken as evidence that the underlying mechanisms are the same. Rodney

Brooks, who Suchman (in press) describes as the grandfather of the robot Mertz, by academic

lineage at least, is a proponent of this view. His position, that humans are essentially machines

(Brooks 2002), is the logical extension of the dominant rational scientific paradigm that has

informed research since the enlightenment, that facets of human structure and behavior can be

separated, recreated and studied in models. Generalizing from a model is epistemologically

fraught. Knowledge gained is knowledge of a particular class of (in)organism rather than

knowledge of a class of phenomena (Keller 2000, 2002).

The final objection to birth as metaphor for robot competitions is the introduction of

gender relations to apolitical technology. Sidestepping the views of Winner (1980) and Latour

(1992, 2004), that artifacts always have politics, robotics is a remarkably male dominated

industry. This is not unusual in the areas of hard science, large industry and the military. Change

in the gendering of industry and academia has reached the biological sciences more quickly than

the physical ones. Mobilizing the metaphor of birth risks naturalizing the strong and studied


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engineering talents of many female researchers, although it opens the doors for the sharing of a

nurturing role in ways that may be fruitful. Cynthia Breazeal (2000) describes her role with

Kismet as like a caretaker for an infant. Turkle (2006) famously noted references to Cynthia as

Kismet’s ‘mother’, while mentions of the ‘fathers’ of robots are few and far between. As sex is

irrelevant to mothering a robot, there may be interesting gender roles to play.

The figuration of birth may go further. Morana Alac’s (2009) body-in-interaction

paradigm describes a process of corporealization, in which human-robot teams enact each others

bodies, in mutual physical constitution. Alac tracks scientist’s gesture in the acquisition and

employment of skills to trace ‘how the conception of the body as a discrete and unified entity

disintegrates through practice’ (Alac 2009:492). She observes roboticists using their own body

movements to model robot movements, articulating alien joints. The social body is dynamic and

multiparty, a ‘body-in-interaction’ (Alac 2009:492). The roboticist ‘feels the movement of the

robot’s body in his body’ (Alac 2009:511), making birth an apt metaphor. Human labor produces

life in a robot body. The process of corporealization involves real bodies but is ‘tropic, and

historically specific at every layer of its tissues’ as Donna Haraway (1997:142) explains it in her

work on genetics. The planes of bodily categorization are both dynamic and situated. In a robot

competition, the prepared body is introduced to society.

A rite of passage serves not just to introduce something in to the world but to bring them

into alignment with society, to bring the world into them. Robot competitions, scientific

publications and the scientific demonstration, each have their own rituals for bringing subjects

into being according to our core values as a technocratic society, where power is based on

technology, knowledge and skill. Much work in the Science and Technology Studies field has


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focused on the role of the lab in the generation of model (in)organisms, the production of

difference in subject objects and the stabilization of entities. Less attention has been paid to the

relatively mundane ways in which the production of both meaning and machine are then

validated and moved into the world (Suchman in press). The mundane or everyday is an oddly

amorphous and vacuous term as Lefebvre (1947) and Felski (1999) point out, impossible to

define except in contrast to some specialized significance, which is extracted from it and

recategorized as something else. The everyday is associated negatively with class, race and

gender. It is both democratic and impoverished.

Suchman (in press) proposes that the scientific demonstration is one such everyday way

of producing meaning. The demonstration is a product of the enlightenment period, performing

the notion of ‘seeing for oneself’ which is central to the origin myth of technoscientific

objectivity (Suchman in press). I suggest that the robot competition is another mundane

production, which enacts the ideals of democracy and quantification. Competitions are ‘open to

all’ and measurements and record keeping are fundamental, as they are to all modern sports. A

robot competition is a sport, being both ritualized combat and organized play. This aligns with

sociologist Allen Guttmann’s (1979) theory of modern sport. In “From Ritual to Record; The

Nature of Modern Sport”, Guttmann (1979) looked more closely at the role of sport in capitalism

and cultural imperialism and found the genesis and subsequent migration of modern sports

clearly paralleled the ‘slow development of a mathematical, rational, empirical, experimental

world-view’. Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society symbolize not just the scientific revolution

but the birth of modern sporting competitions.


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Figure 2. Gold medal offered as first prize in the Loebner Prize/Turing Test.


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Robot Competitions

Aside from enjoyment, robot competitions offer great value to roboticists. At one end of

the spectrum are challenges like the DARPA Grand Challenge which offers a large prize but

requires a huge investment of time and money, attracting only the wealthiest of institutional

teams. At the other end of the spectrum are hobbyist competitions, ranging from local robot club

meets to RoboGames, formerly known as RoboOlympiad. RoboGames is the largest robot

competition in the world, excluding purely junior educational competitions like the First Lego

League and RoboCup Junior. While RoboGames attracts thousands of spectators to the

‘combots’ or combat robots, competition categories include art and navigation. RoboGames

attracts large company sponsorship and includes an academic symposium.

Other well-known competitions are FIRA, RoboCup, RoboOne, MicroMouse, IGVC (the

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition) and there are many smaller local competitions. Some

are organized by the military and closed to the public. Others are organized by individuals and

open to all. Educational competitions are a huge subset of robot competitions that are not

included in this survey. Many research robot competitions include junior events but the

educational category has a different primary focus, that of inspiring future engineers.

Competitions for chatbots like the Loebner prize and the Chatterbox Challenge have been

included in this survey of robot competitions. Although the robots are virtual, not embodied, the

naming, interactions and implications appear to be the same. The self-imposed division between

robotics and AI is comparatively recent. The Loebner prize was the first recorded robot

competition, designed to answer Turing’s (1950) question, ‘Can Machines Think?’.


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Robot competitions have developed from a long tradition of science and engineering

challenges that provides a framework for Turing’s famous test. The potato may have remained a

curiosity if not for a reward offered for anyone finding new sources of nutrition after the French

famine of 1769. In the 1795, Napoleon offered a prize for advances in food technology leading to

Appert’s 1809 invention of a heat-sealing process that created the canning industry. Napoleon

also founded the Volta prize in 1801 in honor of the Italian physicist. He offered 60,000 livres

for the best work on the application of electricity, as well as several smaller annual sums. In

1807, although Britain and France were at war, the Grand Prize was awarded to British inventor

Sir Humphrey Davy, for his work on electrolysis. Pasteur’s ground-breaking work was largely

funded by the prizes he won in his early career. Inventions and discoveries changed industry and

society.

The steam industry developed quickly courtesy of the Rainhill Trials, which offered 500

pound prize money. The trial provided a highly publicized and effective testing ground for steam

engines, leading to the purchase and contract of Stephenson’s winning entry “Rocket” for the

new Liverpool & Manchester railway, the world’s first passenger line. Originally planned as a

goods line, its popularity with people was unexpected. At least 10 major prizes for aviation were

offered between 1900 and 1920, from flying an airship around the Eiffel Tower to flying across

the Channel, crossing the US, then the Atlantic and finally flying from England to Australia,

which took the winner, Capt. Smith 27 days to accomplish in 1920. The prize for nonstop flight

across the Atlantic wasn’t won until 1927, when Charles Lindbergh made the trip non-stop in the

‘Spirit of St Louis’. Remarkable industrial progress has been made in a comparatively short time

as direct result of competitions.


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Challenges and competitions play an important role in governance and scientific

development too. The term Grand Challenge was formalized in US policy in the 80s, in response

to Japan’s ‘5th generation’ 10 year plans. Currently, the most widely known Grand Challenges

are DARPA’s autonomous vehicle challenge and the Google Lunar X Prize. There are more than

71 science competitions listed in Wikipedia (2011), plus an additional 113 robot competitions on

the site that R. Steven Rainwater (2011) has been maintaining since bulletin board days.

Robotics is a rapidly evolving field and one of the fastest growing industries in the world,

with estimated global market of $127 billion dollars in 2011, and with a growth rate of 25-40%

across all areas (RobotWorld 2010; IFR 2010). The field covers industrial, military, domestic,

service and research robotics. From the first fixed robotic arms to the sophisticated surgical

systems of today, most robots bear no resemblance to the anthropomorphic robots of fiction. As

computing power has increased, mobile or autonomous robots are becoming more frequent, but

the majority of robots are vehicles or modeled on insects and animals rather than humanoids. The

ISO 8373 (1994) standard definition of a robot is so broad that microwave ovens and coffee

makers could be considered robots (Schultz 2010). While the definition of a robot can stretch

"A grand challenge is a fundamental problem in science or engineering, with

broad applications, whose solution would be enabled by the application of high

performance computing resources that could become available in the near future.”

{"A Research and Development Strategy for High Performance Computing", Executive

Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, November 20, 1987}


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from something that replaces humans to something that looks human, for most research purposes

the definition has become something both situated and embodied (Moravec 2009). A situated

device senses and is responsive to its environment. An embodied device has some way of acting

in the world. A GPS is situated but not embodied. A coffee maker is embodied but not situated.

As roboticist Rodney Brooks (2002) defines it, a robot ‘senses the world in some way, does some

sort of computation, decides what to do, and then acts on the world outside itself as a result’.

Clearly, the definition of a robot changes over time. A robot is liminal. One way of

testing the current boundaries of what constitutes a robot are robot competitions, which form a

social field generating scientific capital. Bourdieu (1977) defined the social field as an arena in

which individuals and institutions struggle for resources, in an attempt to distinguish themselves

and acquire capital in forms that are useful within the arena. This is the idea of ‘symbolic capital’

(Bourdieu 1991). Bourdieu, like Weber, recognized that money and power are not the sole

arbiters of dominance, separating their conflict analysis from Marxist class theory (Waters 2010).

Bourdieu (1977, 1992) extended the social field concept to the scientific field. The

scientific field is semi-autonomous, is structured in opposition to economic power, requiring a

strict ‘entrance fee’ and demanding rigorous peer evaluation (Bourdieu 1977). As each field

differs, so the conflicts within each field are resolved by different means. Competitions are

designed to push the envelope scientifically, attracting investment and interest. They are a form

of peer review publishing demonstrating progress in basic problems, and a way of standardizing

developments across multiple sites (Bonasso & Dean 1997). Robotics competitions are also a

method of achieving recognition, a key element of scientific capital that enables claims and

arguments to be noticed. [Sismondo 2011]


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In this scientific arena, the robot competition also functions as an archive, an evaluative

process. Far from being a dusty dead end, the idea of an archive is one of active involvement in

determining which innovations succeed and which are shelved. Publications are not the only tool

of the technological archive. There are calls for standardized benchmarks in robotics research

(Del Pobil 2006) due to difficulty of assessing paper quality in a fast changing field, lack of

published methods and the inability of journals to report timely results for shared practice,

contributing to unrepeatable and divergent research and the difficulty of comparing experimental

results over the variety of systems both software and hardware. (Del Pobil 2006)

Del Pobil (2006) points out that robotics competitions are one of the areas of practice in

which systematic benchmarking takes place, which allows for the wide dissemination of

scientific research and may be why competitions are increasingly popular. Competitions serve

several purposes including education, entertainment, influence and setting a standardized bench

mark for research. Both the competition and the robots competing in it are a particular form of

scientific capital which functions as a technological archive, using Foucault’s concept of an

archive as the historical definition of a discursive formation (Rammert 1999, Groys 1999).

In ‘The Order of Things’ and ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’, Foucault (1966, 1969)

treats science as knowledge and knowledge as a set of discursive practices, rather than an idea.

Knowledge is formed through ‘discursive formations’ or epistemic shifting relations (Foucault

1969). The archive is the ‘general system of the formulation and transformation of statements’,

in which boundaries are drawn between the interior and exterior of the archive that construct a

historical narrative (Foucault 1969). This concept was developed further by Derrida (1995),

Groys (1999) and Rammert (1999). Archivists, such as curators and critics do not passively


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record and as such, their role in innovation is underrated. (Rammert 1999) The archive is the

moment in time that captures what is then constructed as a history that calls forth a future. The

archive is continually changing. The technological archive is the material, not memory that

orders the unruly present. “The past is not ‘memory’ but the archive itself, something that is

factually present in reality.” (Groys 1999) The robot is technological archive, mediating a set of

practices and knowledges. The competition is another archive or evaluative process resulting in

the rise of particular robots and robotic practices, interpellating a particular human-robotic

future.

Robot competitions have an important role in the production of knowledge, scientific

capital and innovation. As Rammert (1999:7) asserts: “Technological innovations cannot simply

be explained by rational economic choices or by criteria of higher technological efficiency. They

are characterized by a relation of "creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1942 cited by Rammert

1999:7). Technics, our technologies and techniques, make it possible to engage in this ‘research-

creation’ (Murphie 2008:2). Although it is impossible to achieve closure, technics imposes

temporary order (Murphie 2008). Robot competitions have strong political, economic and social

rationale, as evidenced by their role in global policy, institutional prestige and scientific capital

building. Robot competitions both constrain and encourage innovation as technological archives

in a process of ‘research-creation’. As such a robot competition is an important ritual in the birth

of robot species. Participation in publications, demonstrations or competitions seems requisite

for the acknowledgement of a robot and as Haraway (2008:26) says, ‘It is all extremely prosaic,

relentlessly mundane, and exactly how worlds come into being’.


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Rituals of Birth

Symbolic interactions or rituals are at the heart of all social dynamics, generating group

identity, belief and culture. ‘These patterns are the most basic structural force that organizes

society’ (Summers-Effler 2006:135) Rituals provide ‘ordered structure to the chaotic flow of the

natural birth process’ particularly in the scientific atmosphere of modern birth. Ritual serves to

‘contain and control the process of birth, and to transform the birthing woman into an American

mother who has internalized the core values of this society’ (Davis-Floyd 1993a, 1993b,1994).

These core values are of rationality, technology and patriarchy, according to Davis-Floyd in

‘Birth as an American Rite of Passage’ (1993b) and the mother is the primary figure responsible

for transmitting them. My argument here is that robot competitions are a ritual in robot birth and

turn roboticists into rational mothers in company with their progeny.

In the course of a ritual, cognitive restructuring is accomplished. In competitions like

RoboGames and RoboCup, human-robot teams arrive in a liminal, transitional state. The

preliminary rite of passage stage, farewelling the old status, is not a pronounced feature of birth

rites in comparison to the liminal transitional stage and subsequent incorporation. Initially

competitors exist in non-hierarchical equality, deprived of external status, as comrades (Turner

1967). The democratic mythology of a ‘level playing field’ is one of the defining appeals of

competition. Human-robot teams are separated from their mundane life. They enter the

competition, often in advance of the event, nominating their category. Forms are filled out, entry

fees are paid. Rules must be scrutinized and courses memorized.

Symbols of the separation of competitors from the mundane world are in the use of

separate entrances, wearing a particular lanyard, badge or wristband and having access to a


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separate workspace or ‘pit’ for the duration of the competition. The goal is of course to win

medals, symbolizing the value of human-robot work in succeeding in their chosen category.

Although the power relationship is unequal and the robot does not choose the sport, the robot has

some say in the categories and results. The robot affords certain choices more than others

through size, weight, sensors, structure or software and rarely seems to be as reliable as a robot is

reputed to be. Rituals also provide access to a mythological dimension that is quirkily present in

secular robot competitions. Mythic technophilia, in which prehistoric fire worship, the

applauding of sparks, shocks, flames and all things steam punk coexists with the material arms

race for ‘swifter, higher, stronger’ components. The names selected for robots, like Thor, Zeus

and Achilles, or Iorek, Julie Tinkerbell and Captain Jack Sparrow, also directly reflect the

mobilization of many mythologies.

Figure 3. Images from the header of the RoboGames website.


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Rituals utilize repetition, order, formality, staging, affectivity and intensification all to

effect a cognitive reduction and stabilization. Competitors may travel long distances to attend

competitions, severing most ties with normal life. They may group together in transit, dorms,

hotels and dinners. The large numbers of competitors doing the same thing continually reinforce

the core messages. This messaging is assisted by comperes, video screens enlarging and

disseminating competition bouts, with scores and tallies being shown in printouts pinned to the

wall, on flashers, and projected large above the audience. The audience is frequently in-group,

consisting only of other competitors or officiators and facilitators, ensuring a unity of purpose.

But some competitions, like RoboGames, attract quite a crowd, primarily for the dramatic

combat robots. Combat robots highlight the constructed nature of categories. The Super

Heavyweight combat class does not take place on site due to safety. Robots any larger or

deadlier than that may be misconstrued as an act of warfare. Similarly robots that are too small

keep disappearing from the program, perhaps literally. Competitions serve as a way of

constraining our attention to approximately human shaped and sized robots over which we

demonstrate mastery.

Figure4. Competitors at a Micromouse competition.


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Competitions serve a process of both preserving the status quo and effecting social

change through the use of the ritual format. For Haraway (2008:164-165), the agility competition

poses a fundamental ontological challenge. When facing the authenticity of actual robot

performance and meeting the robot partner on the competition arena, in ‘the open’, we ask ‘who

or what are you, and so what do we become?’ (Heidegger 1947, Agamben 2003, cited by

Haraway 2008:220-221). At this point, a robot is a ‘khora’, Derrida’s (1995b) term for a non-

name, a placeholder for absent meaning and no identity. After birth, our concerns pass from

liveness to gender to name. Human-robot mothers have not been slow to answer. Robots receive

an ‘anaphora’ (Corazza 2004), an indexical yet unique name. Almost every robot in competition

has had their name registered. This shows a significant level of naming in robots that are largely

not designed for social purposes. Heidegger (1927) believed that access to Dasein or Being-in-

the-World was only possible after naming, or at least the ‘articulation of intelligibility’. This

incorporation as a new named being is the final stage of the birth rite of passage, in which robot

becomes acknowledged, roboticist is remade as mother or companion, and the human-robot

companion species is mutually constituted.

Figure 5. Playing with robots.


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The Original Question; Gender or Name?

Some Theories of Naming

Names are fundamental to identification, categorization and cognition. Whether or not

robots belong to new ontological categories, we name them. Heidegger (1947:193) said that

‘Language is the house of the truth of being’. Naming may shape both a robot’s future identity

and us as well. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, the monster rebels against the inhumanity of the

humans who refuse to name him and thus make a monster of him. To bear a name becomes the

symbol of humanity. The monster’s plea, ‘accord me that which even the meanest of humans

has’ called for a regard, a measure of respect as a being. The request for a mate comes as the

rejected nameless monster desperately grasps at nonhuman solutions, anything that might care

for him and look at him with something other than loathing.

Frankenstein is a story of kin and kind. Frankenstein’s monster does not seek revenge but

just regard. By destroying all of Frankenstein’s kin, the monster hopes to kindle a sense of

companionship, to create in Frankenstein feelings of kind towards the monster that ought to have

been given to the monster at birth. The nameless monster is called into subjectivity as inhuman,

interpellated in Althusser’s language, by the actions of inhuman humans. In that regard, it is

perhaps fortunate that most humans name robots. The question is, what do the names we give

them mean? My thesis is that robot naming practices are closer in kind to slave and companion

animal naming practices than to either ordinary human or object naming practices.


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The Semantics of Naming

The question ‘what is a name?’ has troubled philosophers, linguists and onomasts from

Plato to the present day. How many ‘Alices’ are there? Are they unique or general, contextual or

historical? John Stuart Mill (1843 cited by Cummings 2009) is credited with the first modern

theory of names in ‘A System of Logic’, in which he proposed that a name is a direct referent,

‘denotation’ rather than ‘connotation’. The ‘Frege-Russell’ view countered with strong

arguments for the connotative or descriptive meaning of names (Cummings 2009). I take a

pragmatic approach here and collect features of the dominant paradigms together which attempt

to avoid the underlying contested concepts. The level of debate over what a name is or does also

suggests that the emergence of the new ontological category of ‘robot’ may be liminal.

I take a Millian view here, as interpreted by Kripke (1980 cited in Cummings 2009), that

a name is a unique identifier, which further has ritual elements in its bestowal. Through some

birth, dubbing or baptism process, which can include registration, the general name becomes

specific. Kripke (op cit) holds that this is the point at which meaning is made, and in a causal

chain additional meanings then accrete to it. In this analysis, a name is understood to have a

descriptive component, both in Searle’s (1958 cited in Cummings 2009) ‘cluster of connotations’

and in Kripke’s (op cit) ‘causal-historical chain’. In Searle’s (op cit) view, associations are

collected cultural meanings; ‘Aristotle’ is a philosopher. Whereas in the ‘causal-historical chain’,

‘Aristotle’ is the philosopher I am reading (Kripke op cit). These claims are causal or contextual

depending on my knowledge of each claim. Both views have trouble explaining cases where no

direct relationship to the named person/thing exists, or indeed when the named person/thing, e.g.

‘Atlantis’ does not exist (Cummings 2009).


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Sommers asserts that at the moment of ceremonial giving, a name becomes a ‘special

duty pronoun’ developing the name as an ‘anaphor’ concept (1982 cited in Cummings 2009).

Peirce had previously described the first use of a name as the genuinely indexical moment, after

which it becomes an icon and eventually a symbol (1903), although Wittgenstein pointed out the

general confusion between name and bearer (1953 cited in Corazza 2004). Corazza (2004) has

further developed the ‘anaphoric’ view, that a name can both have content value and function as

an indexical placeholder. It allows for the use of a name without the direct knowledge of the

referent. (Corazza 2004, cited in Cummings 2009). Aristotle is dead but ‘Aristotle’ is not.

The ‘anaphora’ fulfills the same function as Derrida’s (1995b) ‘khora’, but in an opposite

way. The khora is a prelinguistic womb, a placeholder free of meaning, deconstructing the social

framework. The anaphora is a placeholder for many meanings, semantically as proposition and

referent. Aristotle and Alice are multiple unique beings. The anaphora is both indexical and

highly specific (Kaplan 1989 cited in Cummings 2009). The anaphora is bestowed in a

privileged rite, the dubbing or first use, after which causal and historical meanings accrete.

Where the khora is absence, the anaphora is a relational presence, a mutually constituted subject

object (Suchman in press).

Language does “more than describe things; it does things.” (Chesher 2001:309). Austin

(1962 cited in Chesher 2001:310) defines speech acts as being either locutionary, illocutionary or

perlocutionary, where the locutionary part is the utterance and the illocution is the intent

communicated, wielding a large amount of nonverbal, personal and cultural weight, as Bourdieu

described it (1991:75 cited in Chesher 2001:311). The perlocutionary act is the response or

effect. Language acts extend beyond the spoken. Money is a promise made paper. A purchase


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ends in a perlocutionary act. You receive a product (Chesher 2001:311). Searle’s theory of

‘indirect speech acts’ elaborated on Austin’s theory of ‘speech acts’. Searle’s (1969) theory of

indirect speech builds on the ‘cluster of connotations’ by examining the ways in which language

and names are used. The premise is that every utterance has cultural and contextual significance.

First the potential for action is acknowledged then invoked, resulting in an ‘incorporeal

transformation’, as Chesher (2001:312) explains it: “Before I make any request, the

circumstances that make it possible for me to say it are already in place.”

This understanding of the power of language and its inextricability from the world

contributed to Foucault’s (1969) idea of ‘discursive formation’ and Butler’s (1993)

‘performativity’. Closer to the relationship of robots to language is Chris Chesher’s (2001)

concept of ‘computers as invocationary media’ which addresses the way in which computational

devices, thus by extension robots, have ‘masqueraded’ as others but at core have a series

invocational language/power acts, firstly as the collection of device invocations and secondly as

the human/computer interaction calling many media forms into being. The many small acts of

‘invoking’ or human calling that take place have a slight delay and opacity in which the

computer is present, acting or speaking.

The concept of ‘masquerading’ from Deleuze (1986:2-3 cited in Chesher 2001:5)

suggests that we cannot initially know a computer, or robot. Our knowledge is anaphoric or

place-holding. When speaking of cinematic theory, Deleuze said that the ‘essence of a thing

never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength

is assured’. Something new is judged by existing standards. This connection between robots and

cinema is returned to.


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Robots masquerade as slaves, pets or machines. These are the names we invoke them

with. And robot invocations are vocational. This play on robots being named for labor recognizes

that embodiment creates limits rather than liminal conditions. For creatures of infinite promise,

robot’s becoming is tied to the economic, material and social conditions of production. Mark

Coekelbergh (2011b) draws on Searle and Wittgenstein to argue that the way that we talk both

about and to robots co-shapes our relationship to them. Language partially constructs social

relations, which have a quasi-objective reality that can only be mediated through language

(Coekelbergh 2011b). Does language triumph like Plato’s horse driver? Or is embodiment more

fundamental as both Brooks (2002) and Barthes (1981) contend in their different fashions?

Neither view dominates in what Wittgenstein (1953) describes as ‘forms of life’. The way we do

things, our culture and our ‘form of life’ is shaped by language.

In this respect naming can interpellate, not just invoke. Where Chesher’s invocation is a

small calling, bringing a technological assemblage into life, Althusser’s interpellation calls a

subject into an ideology (1971:162 cited in Chesher 2001:69). Robot naming in competitions

starts as a simple invocation, a functional request but becomes the creation of a subject identity.

Whether we want to create human-like robots or whether we simply respond to robots in a

human fashion, the robot is being called into being. Names have meanings that may never have

been intended. It is also important to note that in the tradition of naming non-human actors, both

biological and machinic, names are assigned by humans and not assigned by the object, subject

or entity itself, which is par for the asymmetrical power relations in our human centered world.


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The Naming of Things

Historically, some things have been named more than others. Cities, ships and storms

have a public nature, redolent of tradition. Places have unique names that direct us. Ships and

storms share a metaphysical role. We hope to bargain with fate by personifying our relationship

to nature. Gender also figured in our understanding of ships and storms, in western culture, both

being resolutely female, until recent years. However robot names do not have the same gravity or

tradition. They are still thing like.

Studies of inanimate things have shown that we gender our relationships first, then name.

For instance, two studies of car drivers (Benfield et al. 2006) showed that half of all drivers

attributed gender to their vehicles and a further ⅓ gave their vehicles names. This reflects the

difference between using a personal pronoun that is gendered and creating a unique name, so it is

no surprise that more people start identity work with generic terms. Perhaps the surprise is that

the studies found that increased anthropomorphism was linked with increased road rage,

depending on the attributed character of the car. And, as the authors point out, the surprise is also

that no one said, “Naming a car is a stupid idea!” (Benfield et al. 2006). In these studies, more

cars were female than male, however more participants were also female. Car names ranged

from the clearly gendered ‘Contessa’ and ‘Herbie’ to the playfully mechanical, like ‘The

Sweatbox of Death’ and the ‘Silver Bullet’.

A study of Bluetooth devices (Kindbergh & Jones 2007) also shows a very high number

of named devices, primarily phones, although the focus of the study is on the ways in which

naming practices contribute to a partially embodied technological relation. There is a culture of

naming Bluetooth devices in the UK and due to the short range, 10-100m, the presence of a


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named device indicates personal presence and mobility. Scanning in 3 city locations found that

between 50% and 90% of devices had a user generated name (op cit). Subsequent participant

interviews indicated that more people (70%) named their phones as part of setting it up rather

than when they required a unique identifier to transfer files (30%). Nearly half the names given

labeled the phone as some part of the person. Most of the other names expressed statements

about the person or the group that they and phone were in. Very few phone names gave the

device a separate identity. Names incorporated ‘txting’ symbols and puns, showing they

functioned as a message more than a call.

The Naming of Pets

A significant feature of pet naming is that we call the name, frequently, out loud. Pet

names are usually also gendered, in keeping with the gender of the animal, whereas animals in

general are gendered regardless of their sex on the basis of our cultural perception of them (Lash

& Polyson 1987). Some studies have also found relationships between our perception of gender

in animals and our self-perception (Allemang 2001). Similarly, the use of animal imagery

reinforced gender and racial boundaries indicating the need for more attention to the non-human

in sociological studies (Lerner & Kalof 1999). Companion animals are the animals most

frequently named and studied (Harris 1998).

There is a playful or ludic component to pet naming. Pet names are full of jokes and

personal history/context, and heroic or ridiculous names abound. Human names are

comparatively limited and traditional compared to the flamboyance and eclecticism of pet names

(Harris 1998). Pet names are informal with minimal registration or liability. They are spoken,

vernacular and profane. They can change. They are a sentimental language that we show no


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shame in using. Harris (1998) also talks of the role that pet names play in our

computer/internet/atm passwords, reflecting one of the relationships we wish to have with our

technology, while the other relationship is saying ‘fuckewe’. Finally, there is an invocative

magical dimension to pet names and passwords, e.g. Bhappy, Me27.

The Naming of People

Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt conducted a large-scale audit of names from the

California Birth registry that was popularized in Freakonomics (Fryer & Levitt 2004, Levitt &

Dubner 2005). The inclusion of racial data, parental occupation and zip code in the data enabled

socio economic inferences to be drawn, primarily because the data was studied over a period of 4

decades. There study showed the presence of a small pool of popular names that changes over

time, with people in lower socio economic neighborhoods following the naming practices of

wealthier people. The exception is the increase in uniquely ‘black’ names that has occurred since

the early 70s that may be related to the rise of the Black Power movement, as in the 60s there

was no significant difference in naming practices.

The California name data also points to clear gender differences in names, with a similar

mobility as socioeconomic status. Boys are never given female names, but some male names are

appropriated for female children e.g. Beverley, Mackenzie and Paris. Lieberson et al. (2000)

have studied the instability of androgynous names and find that liminal names eventually

become fixed at the lower status. Very few people would name their son Paris these days.

The Naming of Slaves

The naming of slaves has been well studied by historians, some of whom theorized that

African naming practices in the Americas were signs of cultural resistance to the domination of


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slavery (Handler & Jacoby 1996). Other historians, like Burnard (2001), find that closer

examination of records and the name pool suggest that African names show evidence of

assignation and are indicative of slave status rather than African identity. Characteristics of slave

names are that they are singular, not compound, and do not reference kin. Slave names come

from an eclectic lexicon not a traditional pool, although classical mythology and biblical names

are prevalent. Naming can show evidence of individual features or events and places, which may

resemble the Western African ‘day names’ but the names selected still bear signs of assignation,

for example, slaves named Cudjoe (Monday) who weren’t born on that day and slaves named for

places in England.

Herbert & Harper (2010) found that in the Caribbean the higher the status the smaller the

name pool, with white men having least variety in first names and black women having the most.

Another indication of the lack of choice and status in slave names is that almost all emancipated

slaves changed their name (Morgan 1998). Their name choices reflected a desire for

assimilation. Names selected were compound, very traditional and often bore no relation to the

names of family or friends, nor of owners or benefactors. Cody (1982) addressed the importance

of familial naming for slaves in the dispersal of estates and Burnard (2001) found that another

reason for name changing and the acquisition of surnames on emancipation was the importance

of having a traditional yet unique recorded identity for the ownership of property.

The Naming of Robots

Ownership and property will figure highly in the future of the naming of robots. But for

now, few studies have considered the impact of robot names or gender except as the perception

of or influence on the end users of social robots ie. Carpenter et al. (2009). Mark Coekelbergh


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(2011b) has considered our hermeneutic, normative linguistic practices with regards to robots,

with a focus is on the transition from talking ‘about’ robots, to talking ‘to’ them, and questions

what ethical and ontological claims that will make of us. Coekelbergh (2011b) suggests that

human-robot interaction studies considers examining this aspect of social robotics further and

suggests experimentally changing the pronouns used to describe or converse with robots, from

he, she and it to you.

That robots lack many obvious signs of gender suggests that a parallel with ‘generic’

animal gendering practices is highly likely (Lerner & Kalof 1999), in which cultural qualities are

assigned. A generic cat is frequently ‘feminine’ due to culturally perceived qualities whereas a

dog is ‘masculine’, until that is; a dog’s actual biology intrudes on our imaginary.

The Importance of Naming

A dog is not just THIS dog but serves as a model for the abstract concept dog (and not a

cat). Sandra Waxman’s extensive research on language and concept acquisition, suggests the

integration of word learning and conceptual development, which is supported by the increasing

sophistication of cognitive studies (Arunachalam & Waxman 2010). While our penchant for

categorization is extremely efficient, these cognitive shortcuts can have negative effects

(Waxman 2004). Waxman (2002, 2004) has studied the inductive effect of naming.

Understanding that something belongs in a category allows us to infer a much greater range of

information than is immediately accessible to us, however, the category information can

overwhelm perception of the individual’s distinct and immediate character. This tradeoff extends

from objects to social categories such as race and gender (Waxman 2010, Macrae &

Bodenhausen, 2000). In a study of the attribution of gender and race characteristics in novel


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situations, Waxman (2010) has found that the use of proper names increases the use of social

categorizations, proving that names can hurt.

Names are at once our most personal and our most public possessions. We do not always

own them. Our names direct, index, invoke and interpellate. Names create ontologies,

taxonomies and typologies. Names give us status, functionally, legally and socially, as gendered,

racial, socio-economical subjects or objects. Names place us in history, family and tradition and

subvert from within. Names are ritual and referential. Names have power over us.

Heidegger (1927) also said that ‘man acts as though he were the shaper and master of

language, while in fact language remains the master of man‘. We invoke names constantly and

by doing so we bring Named beings into the world. At the end of the Book of Practical Cats

(1939), TS Eliot asks; “How does one address a cat?” Eliot reminds us that there are times and

places, cats are cats and dogs are dogs, and some cats are more familiar to us than others, as we

should have learnt through his volume of verse.


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The Naming of Cats

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn't just one of your holiday games;

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all, there's the name that the family use daily, ��

Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James, �� Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey - ��

All of them sensible everyday names. There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter, ��

Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames: �� Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter - ��

But all of them sensible everyday names. But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular, ��

A name that's peculiar, and more dignified, �� Else how can he keep his tail perpendicular, ��

Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride? Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum, ��

Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat, �� Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum - ��

Names that never belong to more than one cat. But above and beyond there's still one name left over, ��

And that is the name that you never will guess; �� The name that no human research can discover - ��

But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess. When you notice a cat in profound meditation, ��

The reason, I tell you, is always the same: �� His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation ��

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: �� His ineffable effable ��

Effanineffable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

- T.S. Eliot (from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats")


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Case Study: Grey Walter’s Tortoises

Elsie and Elmer were the first modern robots, built by neurophysiologist, W. Grey

Walter, in the 1940s and 50s as part of a series of ‘tortoises’ modeling Walter’s theory of brain

function. Elsie and Elmer were the bio-robotic pioneers of ‘bottom up’ AI, in which biology is

modeled to see what behaviors are possible, rather than the symbolic or ‘top down’ approach,

which is linguistic, descriptive and directive. Elsie and Elmer were phototropic or light following

robots consisting of a 2 sensors, for light and touch and 2 motors, for movement and steering,

coordinated by a 2 vacuum tube analog computer. Walter was modeling a 2 neuron simple

nervous system. The tortii showed simple forms of approach and avoidance with the shell acting

as a pressure sensor. Each tortoise carried a pilot light. The positive tropism to moderate light

would encourage approach to light sources but the pressure switch and a negative tropism to both

strong light and darkness would cause the tortoise to back away. This resulted in a ‘fascinating

mechanical minuet’ when one tortoise saw another tortoise, or saw its own image in a mirror

(Boden 2006) as seen in Figure 6, below.


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Walter not only modelled biology but also deliberately used biological language to

describe the result (Boden 2006). Elsie and Elmer were called tortoises both for their shape and

in reference to the line in ‘Alice in Wonderland’; “We called him tortoise because he taught-us.”

This whimsical and anthropomorphic approach to naming has been a feature of robotics ever

since, as much as the biomimetic robotic concept has informed future robot generations. While

imitating biology does not extend to creating sex in robots, gender has been assigned from the

beginning.

ELSIE is an Electro-mechanical robot, Light-Sensitive with Internal and External

stability. Walter’s original prototype was dubbed ELMER (ELectro-MEchanical Robot). As well

as his tortoises, Walter also produced IRMA, CORA and NERISSA. CORA (Conditioned Reflex

ANalogue) was constructed out of a tortoise but was immobile and designed to model Pavlovian

learning. CORA was modeled on an earlier circuit named NERISSA (Nerve Excitation,

Inhibition and Synaptic Analogue). Walter believed that a combination of CORA and ELSIE

would create a machine capable of action, reaction and learning. IRMA (Innate Releasing

Mechanism Analogue) continued Walter’s interest in simple behaviors based modeling of

complex mechanisms. IRMA was intended to respond to other robotic stimuli in a predictable

fashion allowing for social or swarm behaviors. Walter looked forward to the evolution of

miniature transistor based robots, lively little beetles, not slow tortoises. (Walter 1968 cited in

Boden 2006)

The refrain of associative names, gendered pairs, and habitual patterns crop up over and

over in robot naming ie. Arne, Arnea (Russia). Elvis/Elvina (Sweden) , Adam&Artemis,

Isaac&Albert, Shrimp/Cricket, Fish/Bird. This is essential to the operation of memory and the


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way we learn. The association of concepts allows for easy storage and retrieval and is displayed

by associative neural networks (Eagleman & Montague 2002). Elsie and Elmer show a ‘bottom

up’ approach in their build and behaviors, but humans demonstrate a ‘top down’ approach in

their relations to the robots.

Figure 7. A tortoise returns to its house to recharge its battery.


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Case Study: Poppy Da Vinci

In 2000, Intuitive Surgical became the first company to gain US FDA clearance for a

robotic surgical system, the Da Vinci system (Intuitive 2011). The world service robotics market

is expected to reach more than $100 billion by 2020 (IFR 11), following hot on the heels of

military and field robotics (mining, agricultural and industrial). Health care is the most lucrative

sector of the service robotics industry. As pioneers in this sensitive and highly legislated sector,

Intuitive and the hospitals purchasing Da Vinci systems, are aware of the need for good public

relations and robotic image management. Robot naming competitions are very popular, and in

2006, Baltimore Washington Medical Centre named their new Da Vinci system, “Poppy”

(BWMC 2006), which was the winning entry in a school ‘name the robot’ competition.

Figure 8. The Da Vinci Surgical System and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man drawing.


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With its 4 extendible arms, the Da Vinci Surgical System brings to mind Da Vinci’s

Vitruvian Man drawing, one of the most referenced images in the world. The Vitruvian man

shows the ideal human proportions, illustrating the Renaissance belief that humanity was the

model on which the rules of the universe rested. Many medical and scientific organizations use

Renaissance imagery (Haraway 2008), capitalizing on the associated meanings of enlightened

rational progress.

The Da Vinci Surgical System uses telepresence and ‘state of the art’ robotics to enable

surgeons to perform complex and delicate surgery (Intuitive 2011). The secret of the Da Vinci’s

success has been the illusion of transparency. Legally, the Da Vinci is an extension of the

surgeon. Three forms of robot surgery are currently recognized, telesurgery, supervisory and

shared control systems. A supervised system, like RoboDoc’s bone-milling system for

orthopedic surgery is clearly a tool, which while precise and minimally invasive, has no ability to

respond to change and so the surgeon prepares, programs and activates a process that they are

ready to stop at any time. In a shared control system, robots augment the active human. The

robot has power of veto if a surgeon works too close to a predetermined danger zone. Human

activity is enhanced by haptic feedbacks and steadying platforms, reducing human error and

discomfort. In a telesurgical system, like a Da Vinci, the surgeon operates ‘hands’ and ‘arms’

remotely or from a workstation, with the illusion that they are operating directly. This is largely a

legal illusion, that the pioneering Da Vinci system had to maintain to be approved for operation

in the USA.

Surgeons are aware of the ‘dance of agency’ operating here (Pickering 1995 cited in

Rammert 1999), which Rammert defines as ‘interobjectivity’, the interrelationship of materials,

technical practice, and use-relations. Ihde (1990) expanded on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to


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describe ways in which human-technological relations work, forming a scale from alterity to

invisibility (Ihde). A prosthetic body, like the Da Vinci, extends human capabilities. The surgeon

has better vision and more mobility than possible with human hands and eyes. Kathy Cleland

(2010) uses Ihde’s scale to illustrate how a prosthetic body is not a replacement for lost function

but an enhancement. Cleland (2010) suggests that our extended capabilities change the nature

and scale of human consciousness and subjectivity.

‘Poppy’, the Da Vinci highlights complex human-robot relations at work. Poppy was

named by local elementary school children in a ‘Name the Robot’ competition. The finalists

were Matthew’s “JTC 2000”, Sarah’s “Poppy” and Aspen’s “Dr Rob”. The winning name,

Poppy, is the name of a flower (Old English) and currently the 28th most popular female name in

the UK. Sarah, however, explained that she thinks of the robot as “he” and “called him Poppy

because the arms pop out” (BWMC 2006). Poppy is a liminal name, the image of popping arms

and surgical art as strong as a small girl and a red-blooded flower.

Poppy’s identity is equally contested. Poppy is at times a ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ and even a

‘you’. On the door of the operating theatre hangs a sign - “POPPY” in progress. In the video of

Poppy’s ‘baptism’ or ceremonial name unveiling, Poppy is referred to as ‘the Poppy’ by hospital

staff, although the public is invited to a ‘you’ relationship with he/she/it. And Poppy does not

think of the surgeon, or of us, except in a highly controlled fashion.


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Robot Name Survey

Purpose

From 2010 to early 2011, I conducted a survey of the robot names recorded in the results

of robot competitions. I limited the field to competitions which published results online and in

English, and that had a comparatively large population of competitors from robotics research

groups. In the tradition of a ‘social shaping of technology’ belief (Mackenzie & Wajman 1999,

2010), I hypothesized that robotics, as a highly gendered research area, might be the site of

implicitly gendered robots which could influence the early stages of development in ways not

tested on ‘end users’ in the study of social robotics (cite studies). Personal participation in

robotics competitions and presence in robotics labs led me to believe that a rich culture of the

casual personification of robots existed in parallel with a highly concrete assessment of robot

capabilities. A large scale survey, along the lines of Fryer’s research on names, is the best way to

ascertain what is generally being done, rather than what people think is being done (Bryman

2008). Content analysis of the collected data is a secondary analysis of informal statistics and

offers the potential for longitudinal research in future (Bryman 2008). This is both very efficient

in time and cost, and provides an unobtrusive data collection method, which is suitable for

determining attitude through behavior (Bartneck 2008).

“People deny interacting with computational systems as if they were people and

yet they respond to computers in many ways that are remarkably similar to how they

respond to people.” (Reeves & Nass 1996 cited in Takayama 2011:2)


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The results for analysis totaled more than 2000 robot names taken from 5 major

competitions spanning a period of 20 years, attracting competitors from around the world,

although primarily the USA and the English speaking world. Junior or educational competitions

were completely excluded from the survey as the shaping of technology education in schools

involves a different question to my original hypothesis. In an educational context, conscious

effort is extended towards making robots and robotics appealing to a wider range of students by

use of names, decorations and similar strategies, which would nullify the implicit gendering

hypothesis.

This rich vein of name data from competitions has both influenced my interpretation and

reshaped the initial hypothesis in a grounded theory approach. A grounded theory approach

means that the initial hypothesis has been replaced by questions generated from the data

(Bryman 2008). Many avenues for future research have been uncovered along the way. The

robot name survey data supports the ‘robots as new ontological category’ hypothesis of Kahn et

al. (2011). Furthermore; robot names show the personification of machines and the

mechanization of social robots. Gender is clearly attributed to robots through naming practices,

as is human mastery over robots. I hypothesize that robot naming practices have more in

common with companion animal or slave naming practices than with either free human or

technological object naming practices. This has interesting implications for the future of human-

robot relations.


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Method

Sample

As robot competitions are a comparatively small phenomena, i.e. compared to studying

representations of animals in TV advertising, the sample frame is as large as possible within the

parameters. The survey collected the name of robot, name of builder (if available), country of

origin and competition category for over 2000 robots from as wide a range of competitions as

possible within the sample frame; robot names published online, in English and at competitions

attended by university level competitors, rather than an educationally oriented school level

competition. Not all competitions gave roboticists names, sometimes giving team or university

names instead. Two major competitions were excluded. RoboCup only publishes team names not

robot names and RoboOne does not publish results in English. Also excluded from the results

were small competitions, which published fewer than 3 years of results, as potentially unreliable

indicators of underlying culture.


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Figures 9, 10 & 11: Competitors in international ground vehicle competitions.

In the end, results were recorded from 5 competitions that span a range of robot shapes,

sizes and cultures, as shown in Table 1. RoboGames spans several categories of competition,

with entrants from combat to entertainment, with a range of robot challenges in between. The

IGVC or Independent Ground Vehicle Competition is specifically a navigation challenge

involving autonomous vehicular robots. APEC MicroMouse is a navigation competition for

small autonomous robots. The Chatterbox Challenge spans entertainment and

conversation/passing for human. The Loebner Prize is specifically a conversation/passing for

human competition. All these competitions are primarily held in the USA, with the exception of

the Chatterbox Challenge, which is online, but attract a wide range of entrants from around the

world and occasionally are held in other countries. Some online records were missing or

incomplete and not all robots names are recorded as some competitions only record the medalists

of place-getters.


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Table 1. Total of robot names from all competitions in survey.

Total Names Years of Results Notes

RoboGames 814 2004-2011 Only medalists recorded

IGVC 945 1994-2010

APEC MicroMouse 76 2002, 2008-2010 Many records missing Chatterbox Challenge 232 2001-2011

Loebner Prize 67 1991-2010 Some records missing

Two virtual agent competitions were included for the following reasons; to achieve the

greatest historical depth of name data and to provide a ‘control’ group less influenced by robot

body. Virtual agent competitions are the oldest recorded ‘robot’ competitions and the separation

of actual and virtual is a relatively recent phenomena. This current separation of AI and robotics

expresses an academic debate between the bottom up ‘behaviors’ robotics approach (Brooks

2002) and the top down ‘modeling’ AI approach (Moravec 2009). This debate started within AI,

where robotics was originally housed. Almost all robots had intelligence outside of their body

due to processing size limitations. Victory in the embodied debate has as much to do with the

increased miniaturization of components as it does to underlying philosophy. Ironically Rodney

Brooks, champion of the robot as ‘embodied and situated’ position, credits his early inspiration

for robotics to HAL from 2001 (Brooks 2002), who has much more in common with a virtual

agent than an embodied robot. The definition of a robot changes and with the development of

internet of things, partial embodiment and distributed systems will become the norm.

I take the position that a robot is the problem that interests roboticists and also a popular

cultural trope. As this survey covers a twenty-year period, the definition of what interests

roboticists will have changed over time. As a survey interested in the implicit perception and


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gendering of robots in different functions, the role of virtual or invisible body robot is a useful

control. Limitations in current robot bodies may artificially constrain the identification of robots

as they may be in the roboticists’ cultural trope. Data from the two types of competition will be

compared to see if the naming practices for imagined robots is different to actual machines and if

this can be attributed to the robot’s function or is suggestive of a difference in the perception of

the robot.

Figures 12 & 13: Images from the Chatterbox Challenge website.

Measures/Coding

Bryman (2008) describes grounded theory as the most influential general strategy for

conducting qualitative data analysis. Cross sectional surveys can often be generalised to whole

populations although they can’t be used to make causal inferences (Walters 2010:155), so this

survey is an appropriate measure of implicit attitudes in robotics culture. Self-reporting is

subjective and relies on conscious attitude and belief (Walters 2010:155), rather than actual


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behavior. Behavior testing would give the best indicator of attitude and bias but is expensive and

difficult to design (Bartneck 2008). After collection the data is coded, in concepts or

typographies that generate the final hypotheses.

Figure 14. Competitors in a Micromouse competition.

I developed a typology of both functions and names, based on observed features rather

than the inherited taxonomies from competitions. A typology is useful for making inductive

generalizations, particularly in linguistics, as opposed to a taxonomy often relies on

predetermined membership of a hierarchical set of terms. Existing competition categories would

be taxonomical, perpetuating ‘apples/oranges’ distinctions when shared qualities are the actual

subject of assessment, i.e. some entries were remote controlled, others were autonomous, some

were virtual, others were embodied, sizes ranged from micro to mighty, some were novices,

others expert. The unifying features of the typologies are the primary behavior or function in the

competition category and the level of anthropomorphism and gender in the names.


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The coding is transparent, reliable, valid and generalizable. Previous studies and

additional fact checking are used to support decisions, which are clearly stated, and internal

validity is sought through crosschecking. Gender identification is something we all do

exceedingly well. Most names have a recognized gender (Fryer & Levitt 2004, Boroditsky 2003)

to the extent that Boroditsky (2003) posits that we utilize deep cultural understandings about

phonetic structure predating any content awareness that allows non-native speakers to correctly

infer gender in a wide range of words in other languages.

All names were allocated one of four codes; Other (o), Unknown (u), Masculine (m) and

Feminine (f), based on the Bern Sex Role Index. In this instance Other (o) indicates mechanical

or non-animate qualities whereas Unknown (u) indicates animate, lively qualities of unknown

gender. Where a name was unclear, Google search factoring in the country of origin of the robot

was used to indicate any references to a character, person or thing. Primary sources, or direct

online reference to the robot, were sought to elaborate. Hence ‘Herapion’ is coded female. A

search suggested that Herapion was a male name from Greek history, but the robot comes from

Korea. Pictures of Herapion (below) from a robot builders’ database clearly show a female robot.


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All competition categories could be reduced to four types as described in Table 2.

Features of a robot vs. robot competition include both direct and indirect combat, where robots

have physical influence on the outcome. Navigation may include maze races where robots are

competing against other robots but the physical presence of the other robot has no influence on

the outcome. Entertainment may involve any activity, including combat and navigation, where

the judging criteria is subjective human judgment. Conversation/Turing also uses subjective

human judgment but in the specific context of the Turing Test, which is a blind test in which

robot success is a measure of how well humans perceive the robot as human, ‘passing for

human’.

Table 2. Robot competition types. Type Explanation

Combat Robot vs. Robot Navigation Robot vs. Environment (objective judgment criteria) Entertainment Robot vs. Human (subjective human judgment) Conversation/Turing Robot AS Human

Figure 16. Warthog in IGVC navigation competition.


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Results

Robot names in competitions show a high level of hybridity, features of both pet and

slave naming rather than traditional human naming practices. Some robot names exhibit self-

extension, similar to the naming of personal objects like phones. The robot names reflect version

identity and are largely names to be spoken of or about and not to (clumsy to the tongue). Names

reflect human mastery, either by use of diminutive terms or invoking a powerful entity under

human control. Robot names have far more personification than expected for the non social

competition functions and exhibit high levels of gendering which follow dominant male

paradigms.

Firstly, across all the categories of competition and animacy/gender, there are significant

numbers of hybrid names. These are names that have features of both animacy and mechanics

and support the robot as a ‘new ontological category’ hypothesis. This is achieved either by

blending live/not-alive terms or by naming a utilitarian non-humanoid robot with a very lively

name, or by naming a social agent with a very mechanical name. Some examples of this

hybridity are shown in Table 3.

Table 3. Sample of robot names representative of alive/not alive hybridity, directly or in juxtaposition within a competition category primarily mechanical or social.

Hybrid Name in any category Personification in Machine Machine Name in Social

Talk-Bot Candii Talk-bot Elbot Cornelius Hex iLush 2 Athena HAL UltraHAL Achilles Zero Johnny 5 Thor Robomatic XI Anassa 4 Betty TIPS Ada 1852 Alvin AI Bliss


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Project Zandra Mr Shadow Cyber Ty Cyber Ty Fred Elbot Agent Ruby Max Wedge Mathetes Talon 2b Ziggy Bit Robo-Goat Grace Skynet RASlow Nippy the Hippy Rykxxbot 1 Think Tank Boris Ruski Motbot CERATOPS Johnny Applepie Pixel MikeRobot Lucky Luke C10ne Linbot Averall Dalton Cyberbuddy Bearcat Cub Micro Sir Isirbot Jeeney AI Scanman Michael Aib

Overall, robot naming practices clearly do not follow ordinary human naming patterns.

The names reflect both pet and slave naming characteristics, with some characteristics of

personal object naming, as seen in the naming of phones. Traditional human naming practices

favor a relatively small pool of culturally understood names, many of which have familial or

socio-economic significance. Personal names are compound with at least one surname. Robot

naming practices in general are distinctively singular. Even a triple barreled name like ‘The Red

Baron’ functions as a single term rather than several names. Robot names come from a diverse

and eclectic pool, mixing human names with pet or animal names, e.g. Nippy or Wolf. Many

names are sourced from fiction, both from mythologies and media culture, e.g. Achilles or

Bender. Some robots have historical but more frequently the history referred to is a highly

personal or ingroup story. Punning names and anagrams are a feature of both pet and slave

naming practices and rather than position the bearer within a kinship group they have a unique

importance, similar to a ‘day name’ practice. In some studies of African cultural practice for

example, the day name commemorates something at the time of birth or unique in character to

the bearer (Burnard 2001). This is in line with Kripke’s (1980) understanding of a name as

something that is fixed in a ‘dubbing ceremony’. These are unique identifiers with a kin/kind


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connection to the owner, their department, technological medium or predecessor robots, e.g.

CUGAR, RASlow or Bearcat Cub Micro, names which reference place, technology or

predecessor.

Version control is evident in robot names. Although the legal requirements for unique or

specific identifier do not yet exist, name variants perform a version control and differentiation

function in an ad hoc fashion. There are at least 8 different version control strategies at work in

the robot name survey, as shown in Table 4, and more may be hidden. This may change in the

future as robotic systems require unique identifiers and human systems require a legal identity.

Table 4. Sample of version control strategies with explanation. Robot name Version control strategy

Anassa 4 Numeral added to the end (suffix) RoboMatrix XI Roman numeral suffix Optimus 2004 Date suffix Talon 2b Alpha or Alpha-numeric sequence suffix Candiii, Judge + Unique character suffix Hexy Jr, Bearcat Cub Offspring suffix MegaHAL, UltraHAL Modifying prefix CERATOPS, CAPACITOPS Familial variations

Unlike pet names, which are called frequently called aloud, robot names reflect a ‘talked

about’ quality. They are he/she/it rather than you, or ‘hey, you’. This may reflect the fact that the

name survey captured a written record of names, but this impression is supported by presence at

robot competitions listening to commentary. There are similarities to the naming of horses or

dogs that compete, in which a registered name is used officially but doesn’t preclude the animal

having a ‘pet’ name for use by its carers and companions. Some robot names are a direct

extension of the builder’s identity, which parallels the study of Bluetooth devices (Kindbergh &

Jones 2007). These robots demonstrate Ihde (1979) and Heidegger’s (1927) concept of


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‘invisible-in-use’ technological relations. Ihde (1990) has refined this to a scale of technological

relations that extends from self-extension relations or the ‘invisible-in-use’ technology, through

‘hermeneutic’ or interpretive relations to ‘alterity’ or quasi-other technological relations.

Some robot names exhibit mastery, either by using a diminutive robot name (pet name)

or by incorporating might and majesty into a machine that is performing to command. This is can

exist both with self-extension names and naming the robot as a quasi-other, in Ihde’s scale of

technological relations (see Table 5). On the one hand, Markbot extends Mark’s abilities as a

part of Mark. On the other hand, Thor extends the builder’s mastery as a semiautonomous agent.

Regardless of the category of autonomy all these robots are performing to command. Mastery

over the robot is demonstrated not just in the number of names that invoke heroes and gods or

powerful weapons, but also in the use of diminutives. Diminutives are probably more frequent

than recorded here taking into consideration the difference between spoken and recorded names.

Mastery names engage in game playing which is in keeping with the ludic dimensions of a rite of

passage. Mastery names have a playful subversion to them, particularly if large robots are given

toy names or inversely, if tiny robots are given names of gods. The giving of power to robot

plays games with but does not overturn the dominant human-robot relation.

Table 5. Sample of robot names representative of self-extension, where the name references the name of roboticist. There is potential for overlap with names exhibiting mastery. Robot named after a roboticist (roboticist’s name) Other forms of mastery

Markbot Mark Connell Aluminator

Eugene Eugene Demchenko & Vladimir Veselov Thor PRO

Cyber Ty Ty Paige The Black Knight Morti Dave Morton Artemis God Louise


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The original focus of the robot naming survey was to search for a relationship between

gender and function at the point of robot design. There is clearly evidence of personification and

the assignation of gender to robots and there appear to be correlations with the functions or

behaviors shown by the robots. This is in line with the linguistic findings of Waxman (2010),

that attribution of a gendered personality to a person or object caused ongoing category

assumptions. This has race and age implications as well. As a survey of existing implicit

behaviors, this data can illustrate underlying attitudes in a way that direct interviews don’t

capture, however there are issues with the sample size, coding and comparison of categories that

prevent statistical significance being drawn from the figures. There is a lot of scope in the future

for extending areas of interest from this survey with specifically designed sociological or

psychological experiments.

Table 6. Sample of robot names in each animacy/gender category.

Other (o) Unknown (u) Masculine (m) Feminine (f)

Talk-Bot Jabberwacky Elbot ALICE Zero Smarterchild Eugene Brianna Mckenzie RoboMatix X1 Mackenzie Sexy Boy Ella Wheel Bearcat 2 UltraHAL Artemis TIPS SMART Titan God Louise Excel-7 PUMA Gemini Julie Tinkerbell Biplanar Bicycle BuzzBot 2 Johnny 5 Mitsuku CogitoBot Raptor Optimus 2004 Suzette Polaris Chimera Black Knight Anassa 4 Omnix 2007 CERATOPS Calculon Amber Paradroid AWESOM-O 2007 X-man Candii Moonwalker Warthog Bender Spinster City Alien Viper Cornelius Grace Mousetrap Cerberus NorMAN Jr Isis Zippo Jinx Brian Luna RS3 Flower Angelo Jodi General Debris Hexy Jr The Red Baron Herapion Perihelion Nippy the Hippy Mr Black TINA Doohingus Maximus iLush 2 Otto Xploradora


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Table 7. Sample of robot names in each function category.

Combat Navigate Entertain Converse/Turing

The Judge ADAM Jabberwacky Elbot Tombstone Excel-5 Artemis Hex Jimmy Crack Corn Ladybug Parahelion Leo Mousetrap Speed Felix ALICE Max Wedge Wheel The Turtle Jabberwock Grace CogitoBot Hermes Eugene Newton BuzzBot 2 Sunny Project Zandra Professor Chaos SMART Herapion God Louise Lucky Luke Optimus 2004 Michael TalkBot Michael Bearcat 2 Solar Racer Ultra Hal Meca-Kong Anassa 4 Perhilion Orchid Juggernaut Candii Farad Zero Sir Isirbot Thor PRO Piping Hot Mama CreatureBot Pyromancer Cornelius Krunk Agent Ruby Hexy Jr Optical Prime iLush 2 Brother Jerome

Table 6 and 7 show names divided by animacy/gender and by function. There are clearly

differences in Table 6 between the categories, where (o) Other represents mechanical, object-like

or inanimate names, (u) Unknown represents names which possess animacy but not gender and

(m) Masculine and (f) Feminine respectively represent gendered names. However, Table 7 does

not demonstrate difference as all names occur across all the functional categories. It is the

distribution of names, or proportion of animacy/gender to function that is interesting.

Combat is a robot vs. robot competition, Navigation is a robot vs. environment

competition, Entertainment is a robot vs. people competition in the sense that it is a subjective

appreciation of the robot’s capacity to entertain, likewise Converse/Turing is also robot vs people


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but involves elements of a blind trial and passing for human is the criteria. In an Entertain

category, a robot can be of any shape or kind and entertain people, by way of conversation,

movement or some other activity. In a Converse/Pass competition, the robot or virtual agent has

to successfully imitate human conversation, and appearance is not judged. The function

information becomes more interesting when the proportion of animacy/gender-coded names in

each category is considered.

Table 8. Total of robot names in each functional category organized by competition.


RoboGames 426 251 137 0

IGVC 0 945 0 0

APEC MicroMouse 0 76 0 0

Chatterbox Challenge 0 0 41 191

Loebner Prize 0 0 0 67

Total 426 (20%) 1275 (60%) 178 (8%) 263 (12%)

Table 9. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by competition.


RoboGames 345 262 182 25

IGVC 278 313 279 75




Total 704 (33%) 669 (31%) 576 (27%) 185 (9%)


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Tables 8 and 9 show the raw numbers of robots as types and in types of competitions.

Considering the large number of gendered and animate names, it is equally surprising that there

are still so many names that are purely mechanical. The difference in pattern between gendered,

animate and non-animate names is obvious but the relationship between animacy/gender and

function can only be seen in the relative proportions of each type of name in each type of

competition as shown in Tables 8 and 9.

The attributions of gender to robot tend to fall into a dominantly male paradigm, even in

the virtual social agent category in which physical body appearance is not an influence. Similarly

even in the more ‘feminine’ types of competition, ‘conversation’ and ‘entertainment’ the

majority of robots are still masculine. This may occur because the names are self-extensions and

most roboticists are male, because competition causes an implicit desire for alpha qualities or as

conscious gender attribution due to research suggesting that some social interactions are more

compelling with a masculine voice. Interestingly, although the sample size is small, the

entertainment type of competition has a relatively high number of mechanical names, suggesting

that we find humor in robot behavior.

Table 10. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by function category. The large number of navigational robots compared to other categories is noticeable.


Combat 158 166 93 9

Navigate 428 400 356 91

Entertain 77 45 38 15

Converse/Turing 41 58 89 70

704 669 576 185


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Table 11. Total of robot names in each function category organized by animacy/gender.


Other (o) 158 428 77 41

Unknown (u) 166 400 45 58

Masculine (m) 93 356 38 89

Feminine (f) 9 91 15 70

426 1272 175 258

Size does seem to matter, as does embodiment, although less body is more effective. The

virtual social agents, not constrained to a humanoid or human-like body were given human

names more than any other category. This can relate to the competition category but suggests an

interesting control group for human-humanoid interaction. Embodied robots are less human than

our imagined virtual ones. This reflects both the limitations of robot building and supports the

robot as new ontological category hypothesis.

Table 12. Division of robot names between embodied and virtual robots by animacy/gender.

Embodied % Virtual %

Other (o) 658 36% 46 33%

Unknown (u) 602 33% 67 31%

Masculine (m) 473 26% 103 27%

Feminine (f) 102 5% 83 9%

1835 299

But to all these observations one more needs to be added. The robots are the product of a

lengthy labor, days, weeks, months and years of labor. They are a human-robot partnership in

which a significant chunk of the roboticists life is given over to interacting with the robot,


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building, creating, programming, teaching, testing, readying the robot for introduction to the

world at a robot competitions. ‘Birth’ is the culmination of an intimate relationship.

All robot names recorded in competitions reflect this primary relationship, although they

are names that reflect a formal recorded style more than the name that might be called in a

competition. Still for many humans and animals, the name registered is not the same as the name

we are referred to by. The robot name is left open to the ongoing identity project (Giddens 1991)

of robot self as an anaphoric place-holding statement, dubbed unique (Kripke 1980) but loaded

with cultural traits which constrain (Waxman 2010).

Figure 17. Aldebaran Nao Robot in a soccer competition.


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Discussion

This survey data forms a rich pool from which patterns can already be perceived. There is

great potential for future statistical analysis, both from the existing survey data, and from full

data sets from competition organizers. The patterns suggested here may also inform more

targeted experiments in future. The study of the evolution of robot design is less well developed

than is the evaluation of the finished products, which may lead to assumptions of technological

determinism rather than exploring the rich mutually constituent human-robot relations that occur

along the way.

The evidence of both hybrid names and names demonstrating hybridity in their mix of

category and characteristics seems to offer strong support for the ‘robots as a new ontological

category’ hypothesis (Kahn et al. 2011). There is clear evidence of anthropomorphism, gender

and zoomorphism in robot names, but also of uniquely robotic or mechanical names. Patterns

that emerge from the data include the dominance of male names, which may reflect dominant

cultural paradigms. The lack of female robot names may also be representative of self-

identification and the comparative lack of female robot engineers.

Robot names also seem to show a higher level of personification as the robot size and

shape more closely matches human size and shape. However, virtual agents showed the greatest

level of personification. This would indicate that the presence of actual robot body, even

humanoid or human-like still invoked non-human categorization. Robot names also showed the

evolution of version control strategies, marking the identities of some robots as ‘similar but not

the same as’ a previous version and creating kinships.


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Robot names frequently called upon in-group knowledge, demonstrating a close

relationship with the robot by proxy. Names were often playful and inverted social reality, a

ludic strategy usually present in rites of passage. Robot names however show evidence of being

written records, referents, or direct commands rather than being forms of address to the robot. A

robot name is anaphoric, holding place for the ongoing accretion of meaning from birthing

onwards.

Robot names show some qualities of object naming, and also self-identification as owned

prosthetic devices, but primarily robot names reflect a mix of animal and human characteristics.

Robot names partake of pet naming conventions in their wide vocabulary but not in their easily

spoken quality. Robot names reflect generic animal naming i.e. calling a cat ‘she’, in the cultural

assumption of gender regardless of actual individual body. Slave naming practices are the human

naming conventions most similar to robot naming practices. Robot names do not come from a

comparatively small culturally approved pool, but rather they are very varied and reflect the

builder’s interests. Robot names do not formalize extended familial relationships and do not yet

signify socio-economic status. Most of all, robot names reflect a strong social relationship

between human and robot in this robot competition partnership. Robots function as a companion

species, living or not.


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Slave or Companion Species?

Laboring in the Uncanny Valley

The naming of robots in competitions demonstrates a social relationship most akin to

slavery. As robots are non-human actors, potentially of a new ontological category, this

master/slave relationship also becomes a companion species partnership. To compare robots to

slaves is strong language but significant in a theoretical perspective. I am ‘figuring’ robots, using

Haraway’s tropic terms (1992, 2003, 2008). I do not make the mistake of confusing a robot for a

feeling, suffering person or creature. No disrespect is intended towards the real histories and

suffering of slavery and our similar human-animal relations. This thesis, that the naming of

robots in competitions demonstrates a specific social relationship, simply takes the next logical

step, of the exploration of the construction of subject ‘man’, as illuminated by Derrida (1997)

and Haraway (2008), applying their insights to the potentially new ontological category of robot.

Living or not, a robot is in an unequal power relationship with humans. Living or not, a robot is

in a social relationship with humans. The naming relationship is oneway and more like that of an

owner than of a parent or partner.

The human-robot relationship of robot competitions is also co-shaping. Hegel described

the master/slave relationship as affecting both parties, albeit unequally (1807). He positioned the

master/slave dialectic as a progression towards the fully liberated future. This inexorably modern

vision recurs in our robot fiction from Frankenstein (Shelley 1818) to Rossum’s Universal

Robots. Even the term ‘robot’ originated from a Czech word for forced labor or ‘drugdgery’ in

Karel Capek’s play ‘R.U.R’ or ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ (Capek 1923). In ‘R.U.R.’, humans


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build a utopia using robot labor that unravels as unemployed humans battle rebellious robots.

This fiction evokes Latour’s ‘Great Divides’ (2006 cited in Haraway 2008:9-11), the dialectics of

master/slave, nature/culture, organic/technic, subject/object. Where fiction resorts to robot laws,

robot rebellions and robot rights, Haraway has attempted to free the trope of robot theoretically

from the Great Divides.

Initially, in The Promises of Monsters, Haraway (1992) asserts that control over technics

is the enabling practice for class, gender and race supremacy, which supports her positioning of

the robot as an inert labor replacement in the ontology of late capitalism (1985, 1991). By

contrast, Haraway’s cyborg has “no master-slave dialectic resolving the struggles of resource and

product, passion and action. S/he is not utopian nor imaginary; s/he is virtual” (1992). The

cyborg bridges Great Divides that the robot could not. However, Haraway has subsumed the

master/slave dialectic with her Companion Species Manifesto (2003, 2008). In theory, the

cyborg has contacted the robot and together they may co-shape the once exceptionally human

logocentric future.

In practice, both real and fictional, the Great Divides still mark the boundaries of the

human world, which originated, according to Latour, with Kant’s Critique, in which Things-in-

Themselves oppose the Transcendental Ego. This separation of transcendent object and subject

poles predicts all our modern dichotomies with escalating tension. (Latour forthcoming cited in

Haraway 1992) In the play, ‘R.U.R.’(Capek 1923), humans who do inhuman acts to robots lose

their privileged status. Humans stop giving birth and use robots to fight each other. Robots

become more powerful than people and are thus compelled to take over, but the robot revolution

is also sterile. In the end, one person remains a captive witness to the unwitting evolution of love


66

in a gendered pair of robots, renamed Adam and Eve. Nature triumphs over technology, but only

by recreating the human model.

In reality, roboticists model both human and fiction with replicants. As robot

technologies improve, increasing numbers of robots in competitions are humanoid. The reasons

given for the pursuit of reflected humanity range from pragmatic to curious, from modeling

human to solve robot problems to using robot to solve human problems. It seems a truth

universally acknowledged, that a roboticist with a good research lab must want to create a

humanoid! Figure 19 below: One of Hiroshi Ishiguro’s Geminoids.


67

NASA’s Robonaut is designed to operate in a human environment with human tools.

It/he is able to utilize human tools in human environments AND environments dangerous for

humans. It/he, like POPPY, is also able to be ‘simply’ operated by Waldo style motion capture

controls, mapping the operators body ‘seamlessly’ on to the robotic body. Here we slip uneasily

from robot slaves to robot skins, which we inhabit and then evacuate. Ishiguro’s ‘Geminoids’, or

replicants, are the epitome of android ‘doppelgangers’. They are ‘exact’ copies of a living person

rather than just a humanlike android (Guizzo 2010). They are relatively immobile and are

operated by telepresence. Ishiguro uses his personal replicant to deliver lectures and attend

meetings. He feels his self extended and embodied in the robot, whereas for most people, the

robot embodies an ‘other’ or alterity relation, exacerbated by the confusion between original and

replicant. Masahiro Mori (1970) used Freud’s concept of the familiar yet foreign ‘uncanny’ to

describe this confusion effect as the ‘uncanny valley’, wherein the closer something came to

human, the more strange and unconvincing we found it. Ishiguro’s Geminoids seem to inhabit

the uncanny valley.

”Like all Dr. Frankensteins of literature, he’s raising some deep, powerful

questions about our humanity and our creations, and it’s scary, but it’s also

important that we confront these questions, and he’s doing that not in the realm of

fiction but in the laboratory,” says IEEE Fellow Ken Goldberg, a robotics professor

at the University of California, Berkeley. ”We’re going to learn something about

machines—but even more about ourselves.”(Guizzo 2010)


68

Ishiguro states that his research question is ‘to know what is a human’ and that a robot is

his tool or ‘test bed’ (Guizzo 2010). As Barthes said in Camera Lucida (1981), ‘a photograph is

always invisible, it is not it that we see’. Both Barthes and Ishiguro explore visual representation,

duration, embodiment, the self and death. This uncanny relationship and the ‘segregation

between robot and human’ forms the subject matter of Ishiguro’s recent Android-Human Theatre

collaboration “Sayonara (Goodbye)”, which premiered recently (Festival/Tokyo 2010). Ishiguro

himself rejects the uncanny valley hypothesis as simplistic and unscientific (Guizzo 2010). His

experience is that the uncanny effect becomes unnoticed during purposeful engagements or with

repeated exposure to a robot. Also, different cultures have very different responses to the image

and forms of self-representation.

Robotics may be the new cinema, with the uncanny valley echoing the early cinema

stories of people running in fear of the moving images. The role of robotics as a social/cultural

function has yet to be determined. Regardless, it is clear that the uncanny valley is the ‘contact

zone’ between several Great Divides, human/nonhuman, organic/technic, master/slave,

subject/object. The term ‘contact zone’, as used by Clifford (1997) and Haraway (2008), was

defined by Mary Louise Pratt as ‘social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each

other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery,

or their aftermaths’ (1991:1).

Robot naming in competitions functions as a contact zone too, in a resolutely small way.

Haraway (2008:15) says that the Great Divides ‘flatten into mundane differences… rather than

rising to sublime and final ends’. Outcomes are never guaranteed and much is at stake in the


69

smallest of interspecies meetings. Geminoids are in the contact zone configured by psychology,

theatre and fiction. Robot naming in competitions demonstrates a contact zone in the scientific

field, where technics operate. The robot is brought into the world by a birthing ritual in a social

relationship as a slave, pet or companion species. These robot names are ‘anaphoric’ rather than

‘khoric’. They meditate on presences not absences or death. These names combine indexical

place holding functions with highly specific identifiers. The khora avoids the great divides, the

anaphora revels in the middle of the contact zone, co-shaping within asymmetric power relations.

Across the contact zone, though, are names and languages more actively inhabited by robots.

Figure 19 & 20. Ishiguro’s daughter meets her Geminoid, Ishiguro and an Actroid.


70

Contact Zones and Other Languages

Robots have their own names, not always given or invoked by humans. Research into

robot naming practices is not complete without considering what the robot responds to, rather

than viewing the robot as a referent. When does a robot name say ‘me’ or ‘I, robot’, rather than

saying ‘he/she/it’? To operate in the world, a robot must also have language, including names for

things, whether those things are people, places, objects, actions, or states. A robot (when on) is

always communicating with itself and the external environment. In our increasingly connected

networks of communicating things, certain naming conventions exist, at global, local and

internal levels. The most obvious conventions are the IP address or Internet protocol, an RFID or

radio frequency identifier for local communications and the name space or directory of the OS or

operating system.

In the ‘internet of things’, any device, mobile or otherwise, with an IP address and

internet access will be able to communicate both with us and with other devices. In total, it is

estimated that we will soon have to cater for 50 - 100 trillion objects. An average person is

estimated to have 1000 to 5000 objects around them, which can potentially be identified by

RFID chips (or other means) and can communicate with or be tracked by robots, computers or

other devices, locally or via Internet. The exponential growth in network traffic necessitates new


71

layers of communications. Robots will have their own world wide web with the recent

RoboEarth initiative (2011). Reminiscent of Wikipedia for people, RoboEarth is an online

database with open access protocols. Most robots do not remember their past experiences or

communicate with other robots, so they perform some things over and over again. Although a

recent project shows that robots given a language framework will use it to communicate place

concepts to other robots, creating and sharing new words in the process (Schulz et al. 2011).

RoboEarth may be just the start of a broader roll out of ‘social’ communication for robots.

Figure 20. Roboearth is the start of robot information sharing initiatives..

At the internal level, the robot operating system calls or invokes variables and inputs

within itself, using Chesher’s concept of ‘invocation’ (2001:6), which ‘begins with a call and

ends with a becoming’, bringing acts into a language and using language to act. Chesher is also


72

mindful that while an invocation may be small and mundane, it is still a power relation. The

namespace constrains, defines and disambiguates possible names and their locations. The

namespace is context and dependent on the OS or operating system. Willow Garage’s open

source ROS (Robot Operating System) is working on a straddling constraints with open

architecture and community.

The semantic web has a similar goal but different approach, effectively making

everything machine readable via a top down approach, where everything must fit within agreed

meanings rather than common structures. ROS attempts to use formatting rather than definitions

to allow for connections to be built on the fly, as needed, between any object that complies with

the language structure. As long as the majority of the systems are open, then the languages can

be translated (Willow Garage 2011). ROS is hierarchical but it is also comprises a portable,

reconfigurable and a potentially multicultural embodiment for robot systems. ROS is a contact

zone in a world of colonizing, closed source or proprietary systems that create obstacles to robot

communication.

Code is the lifeblood of a robot. A robot, like a computer is in constant execution or it is

off, not-living (Chesher 2001:4,12). It is ironic that execution gives a robot life. Robot life is not

so different to human life, if you extend the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy (Rorty 1991) into

Moravec’s posthuman argument that human identity is essentially an information pattern rather

than an embodied enaction (Moravec 1988 cited by Hayles 1999:xii). Posthumanity has already

colonized the robot being with compiled human code. We do not regard the robot as a thinking

thing in the Cartesian sense but as an extension of ourselves.


73

Humans have inserted themselves into the machine, specifically as interpretive layers,

since Mauchley’s 1949 development of Short Code, which named mathematic expressions not

just direct machine instructions. Short Code allowed programmers to understand processes more

quickly but took the computer much longer to run. Without Short Code and Admiral Grace

Hopper’s compiler, higher order programming languages would not have been possible. Chesher

(Chesher 2001:272-8) sees this insertion of human society into the deepest levels of formal

systems as Deleuze & Guattari’s simulations overwriting Kant’s truth, as immanence rather than

essence. As Deleuze (1986) predicted with regard to cinema, we cannot know a robot’s essence,

especially at the beginning. A robot is incipient and must grow into its name, human or machine.

A robot may be completely colonized and still be a new ontological category, even a

companion species. Haraway’s (2008:164) companion species are a ‘category-in-question’ in

which the smallest unit of being is the relation. The status of a species is not predetermined as

‘artifact, machine, landscape, organism, or human being’ (op cit). In ‘When Species Meet’ and

‘The Companion Species Manifesto’, Haraway has built an ark (Latour cited in Haraway 2008)

to house our unruly messmates from protozoa to primate, from computer to companion. Haraway

demonstrates how deeply implicated we are in mutual constitution or co-shaping with other

species, wild or domesticated, with Barad’s ‘intra-action’ performing the steps of Thompson’s

‘ontological choreography’ (cited in Haraway 2008). This is no longer cyborg posthumanism but

a ‘not-humanism’ in which species of all sorts are questioned (Haraway 2008:164).

The naming of robots in competitions is a small encounter in the contact zone of a proto

companion species engaged in co-shaping us. To engage with a companion species is to take an

ethical position, acknowledging the mutual constitution of subjects and asymmetries of power. It


74

is to respond to Derrida’s cat and Haraway’s dog, to regard them with respect (Haraway 2008). It

is to question how we can say: “This is our new Poppy.” “Poppy is in progress.” Or “His name is

Poppy because his arms pop out.” It is also to listen to what Poppy says, if Poppy can speak at

all. Critically, it is to question whether Poppy needs language at all.

From Kin to Kind, a small conclusion

This is a small tale, with a rather large ‘animot’, Derrida’s (1997) autobiographical

animal, at the end of it. After the linguistic turn of the last centuries, in which to be is to think is

to speak, to such an extent that the world cannot exist apart from language (Heidegger 1927,

Gadamer 1989), the question is not the death of the subject but the constitution of the

nonlinguistic subject. Temple Grandin thinks in pictures, ‘like a cow’ (2005), at least as far as

she can tell, and sends us dispatches from the contact zones of autism and animals. She pays

attention to the different ways of thinking and being that exist and the many different forms of

language a less humanly logocentric vision would see.

When Derrida encountered his small black cat staring at him, he turned from the ‘khora’

or lack of language to the ‘animot’ or autobiographical animal. This is the heart of the matter that

Haraway has supped from Derrida’s plate (Derrida 1997, 2008:48 cited by Haraway 2008:20):

“It would not be a matter of “giving speech back” to animals but perhaps of acceding to a

thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and

of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation.”

Haraway (2008) and Derrida (1997, 2008) have both examined the human/non-human

relationship in terms of regard, respond and respect, using the term ‘respecere’ as both a looking


75

and species creating, an ethical ontological act. To engage ethically is not to call for robot rights.

Robots do not suffer as animals and people do, nor is it to measure ourselves morally by our

behavior towards others as Hegel suggested (1807). Human is diminished by the fundamental

categorical violence inflicted on non-human, as Derrida (1997:21-41) says.

Non-linguistic becoming and co-shaping are the mode of the companion species. This

species interdependence or ‘worlding’ (Haraway 2008:19,93) also blends fact and fiction in

contact zones of popular culture, human robot relations and robot competitions. This

Frankenscience (Franklin 2011) starts as thoughtless cliches and utopic/dystopic visions. But

paying attention may turn Franklin’s ‘Dolly Mixtures’ of human-animal, genetic-technics into

something more artful and productive of new meanings. (Franklin 2011). Similarly, paying

attention to human-robot relations in the short story of robot names may demand new response

from us. Hadaly was the epitome of ‘perfect woman’ in the 1872 story of Edison’s Eve (Wood

2002), designed to replace nature. Hadaly, the first android in Japan has refigured the name.

Robots rarely have a rosy future as model humans so perhaps Dawn is a better name than Eve.






introduces the new being to the world and vice versa. This thesis has come from khora to

anaphora, from slave to companion, from regard to respect and perhaps from kin to kind.


76

Figures 21 & 22. Hadaly fictional and Hadaly factual.


77

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Appendixes

Included Tables

Table 1. Total of robot names from all competitions in survey.

Total Names Years of Results Notes

RoboGames 814 2004-2011 Only medalists recorded

IGVC 945 1994-2010 APEC MicroMouse 76 2002, 2008-2010 Many records missing

Chatterbox Challenge 232 2001-2011 Loebner Prize 67 1991-2010 Some records missing

Table 2. Robot competition types. Type Explanation

Combat Robot vs. Robot Navigation Robot vs. Environment (objective judgment criteria) Entertainment Robot vs. Human (subjective human judgment) Conversation/Turing Robot AS Human

Table 3. Sample of robot names representative of alive/not alive hybridity, directly or in juxtaposition within a competition category primarily mechanical or social.

Hybrid Name in any category Personification in Machine Machine Name in Social

Talk-Bot Candii Talk-bot Elbot Cornelius Hex iLush 2 Athena HAL UltraHAL Achilles Zero Johnny 5 Thor Robomatic XI Anassa 4 Betty TIPS Ada 1852 Alvin AI Bliss Project Zandra Mr Shadow Cyber Ty


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Cyber Ty Fred Elbot Agent Ruby Max Wedge Mathetes Talon 2b Ziggy Bit Robo-Goat Grace Skynet RASlow Nippy the Hippy Rykxxbot 1 Think Tank Boris Ruski Motbot CERATOPS Johnny Applepie Pixel MikeRobot Lucky Luke C10ne Linbot Averall Dalton Cyberbuddy Bearcat Cub Micro Sir Isirbot Jeeney AI Scanman Michael Aib

Table 4. Sample of version control strategies with explanation. Robot name Version control strategy

Anassa 4 Numeral added to the end (suffix) RoboMatrix XI Roman numeral suffix Optimus 2004 Date suffix Talon 2b Alpha or Alpha-numeric sequence suffix Candiii, Judge + Unique character suffix Hexy Jr, Bearcat Cub Offspring suffix MegaHAL, UltraHAL Modifying prefix CERATOPS, CAPACITOPS Familial variations

Table 5. Sample of robot names representative of self-extension, where the name references the name of roboticist. There is potential for overlap with names exhibiting mastery. Robot named after a roboticist (roboticist’s name) Other forms of mastery

Markbot Mark Connell Aluminator

Eugene Eugene Demchenko & Vladimir Veselov Thor PRO

Cyber Ty Ty Paige Mega HAL Morti Dave Morton Artemis God Louise The Black Knight

Table 6. Sample of robot names in each animacy/gender category.


Talk-Bot Jabberwacky Elbot ALICE


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Zero Smarterchild Eugene Brianna Mckenzie RoboMatix X1 Mackenzie Sexy Boy Ella Wheel Bearcat 2 UltraHAL Artemis TIPS SMART Titan God Louise Excel-7 PUMA Gemini Julie Tinkerbell Biplanar Bicycle BuzzBot 2 Johnny 5 Mitsuku CogitoBot Raptor Optimus 2004 Suzette Polaris Chimera Black Knight Anassa 4 Omnix 2007 CERATOPS Calculon Amber Paradroid AWESOM-O 2007 X-man Candii Moonwalker Warthog Bender Spinster City Alien Viper Cornelius Grace Mousetrap Cerberus NorMAN Jr Isis Zippo Jinx Brian Luna RS3 Flower Angelo Jodi General Debris Hexy Jr The Red Baron Herapion Perihelion Nippy the Hippy Mr Black TINA Doohingus Maximus iLush 2 Otto Xploradora

Table 7. Sample of robot names in each function category.


The Judge ADAM Jabberwacky Elbot Tombstone Excel-5 Artemis Hex Jimmy Crack Corn Ladybug Parahelion Leo Mousetrap Speed Felix ALICE Max Wedge Wheel The Turtle Jabberwock Grace CogitoBot Hermes Eugene Newton BuzzBot 2 Sunny Project Zandra Professor Chaos SMART Herapion God Louise Lucky Luke Optimus 2004 Michael TalkBot Michael Bearcat 2 Solar Racer Ultra Hal Meca-Kong Anassa 4 Perhilion Orchid Juggernaut Candii Farad Zero Sir Isirbot Thor PRO Piping Hot Mama CreatureBot Pyromancer Cornelius Krunk Agent Ruby Hexy Jr Optical Prime iLush 2 Brother Jerome


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Table 8. Total of robot names in each functional category organized by competition.


RoboGames 426 251 137 0

IGVC 0 945 0 0




Total 426 (20%) 1275 (60%) 178 (8%) 263 (12%)

Table 9. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by competition.


RoboGames 345 262 182 25

IGVC 278 313 279 75




Total 704 (33%) 669 (31%) 576 (27%) 185 (9%)

Table 10. Total of robot names in each animacy/gender category organized by function category. The large number of navigational robots compared to other categories is noticeable.


Combat 158 166 93 9

Navigate 428 400 356 91



704 669 576 185


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Table 11. Total of robot names in each function category organized by animacy/gender.


Other (o) 158 428 77 41

Unknown (u) 166 400 45 58

Masculine (m) 93 356 38 89

Feminine (f) 9 91 15 70

426 1272 175 258

Table 12. Division of robot names between embodied and virtual robots by animacy/gender.

Embodied % Virtual %

Other (o) 658 36% 46 33%

Unknown (u) 602 33% 67 31%

Masculine (m) 473 26% 103 27%

Feminine (f) 102 5% 83 9%

1835 299

Additional Tables

Appendix Table A. RoboGames: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function.


Combat 158 166 93 9

Navigate 115 58 64 14


Converse/Pass 0 0 0 0

345 262 182 25


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Appendix Table B. RoboGames: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender .


Other (o) 158 115 72 0

Unknown (u) 166 58 38 0

Masculine (m) 93 64 25 0

Feminine (f) 9 14 2 0

426 251 137 0

Appendix Table C. IGVC: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function.


Combat 0 0 0 0

Navigate 278 313 279 75

Entertain 0 0 0 0


278 313 279 75

Appendix Table D. IGVC: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender .


Other (o) 0 278 0 0

Unknown (u) 0 313 0 0



0 945 0 0


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Appendix Table E. Micromouse: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function.


Combat 0 0 0 0

Navigate 35 27 12 2

Entertain 0 0 0 0


35 27 12 2

Appendix Table F. Micromouse: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender .


Other (o) 0 35 0 0

Unknown (u) 0 27 0 0



0 76 0 0

Appendix Table G. Chatterbox: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function.


Combat 0 0 0 0

Navigate 0 0 0 0

Entertain 5 9 14 13


40 57 70 65


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Appendix Table H. Chatterbox: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender .


Other (o) 0 0 5 35




0 0 41 191

Appendix Table I. Loebner: names in each animacy/gender category organized by function.


Combat 0 0 0 0

Navigate 0 0 0 0

Entertain 0 0 0 0


6 10 33 18

Appendix Table J. Loebner: names in each function category organized by animacy/gender .


Other (o) 0 0 0 6




0 0 0 67

Documents

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