With this post, I’ve decided to flag off a new blog series, Tonight’s Robot whose raison-de-etre are the robots from real life research and fiction; what they can teach us about Robotics and its allied fields (Human-Robot Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Roboethics, etc).

So this post is about the U.S Marine Corps robot commanders from the 2014 blockbuster Interstellar named TARS, CASE, and KIPPS.

Robots of Interstellar (2014)

Picture by Jeorge B. George

Here’s what these KitKat bar shaped Bots teach us:

1. Companionship

The space missions on Interstellar were decades-long (yeah, relativity). In this scenario, with crew commanders single-manning a ship and spending years with no human around - things can get quite monophobic. The Artificially Intelligent and almost sentient robots shown in Interstellar showcase features like empathy, identification of needs, sarcasm, humour, honesty; just like one would expect a human to be.

2. One with the humans

The robots actually spend all their time with humans or other robots. They are as important as the human flight commanders. Equal responsibility and equal capability sans the Relativistic Math skills which Cooper didn’t possess. Treatment as equals was something I covered in the post on Big Hero 6’s Soft Intelligent Bots article as well. The robots of the future would not be limited to the 4Ds - Dangerous, Dirty, Daunting, Dull but would cohabitate with humans as equals.

3. Human-Centric, not Robo-Centric