An interactive robot is to sign up to Facebook in a desperate bid to get friends. A boffin Dr Nikolaus Mavridis has built a robot and given it its own Facebook profile page to help foster meaningful relationships with people.

Mavridis hopes that embedding it in a social web will give rise to a sustainable friendship can grow up between man and machine. The robot, which can recognise faces, is based around a PeopleBot machine from ActivRobots to which they have added a range finder, touch screen and stereo camera.

It will have the face of Arabic scholar Ibn Sina aka Avicenna. Ibn can have real-time conversations and it will maintain a database of its friends and their social relationships based on information in Facebook. It will have a
social database to keep its friends list up to date.