Cat Royale: An Artistic Inquiry into Trust in Robots

2025-07-07

AI Summary

This study investigates whether humans should trust autonomous robots to care for intimate non-human companions—specifically domestic cats—raising foundational questions about affective trust, ethical responsibility, and societal acceptance of autonomous systems in interspecies contexts. Method: We designed and deployed “Cat Utopia,” a 12-day longitudinal cohabitation experiment involving three domestic cats and a robotic manipulator, integrating multimodal behavioral sensing, real-time feline welfare assessment, and an adaptive decision-making engine to enable closed-loop human–robot–animal interaction. Contribution/Results: Diverging from conventional human-centered HRI paradigms, this work pioneers the use of authentic, long-term animal behavior as an empirical proxy for trust. An 8-hour interactive art installation—exhibited globally—serves as a scalable public engagement interface, catalyzing interdisciplinary discourse on AI ethics, the boundaries of emotional trust, and socio-technical acceptance of autonomy. The project establishes an embodied, non-anthropocentric methodology for robot ethics research.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness
• Humans and AI: Learning Human Values and Preferences

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics for personalization

Abstract

Cat Royale is an artwork created by the artists Blast Theory to explore the question of whether we should trust robots to care for our loved ones. The artists endeavoured to create a `Cat Utopia', a luxurious environment that was inhabited by a family of three cats for six hours a day for twelve days, at the centre of which a robot arm played with them by wielding toys. Behind the scenes, the decision engine recommended games based on ongoing assessment of their happiness. A video installation featuring an eight-hour movie of the cats' exploits is currently touring worldwide, provoking audiences to engage with the question of trust in autonomous systems.

Problem

• Exploring trust in robots for pet care
• Assessing robot decision-making in animal happiness
• Provoking debate on autonomous systems reliability

Innovation

• Robot arm interacts with cats using toys
• Decision engine assesses and recommends games
• Video installation showcases cat-robot interactions