While in America, Boston Dynamics develops your robot SpotMini, gradually turning it into a “real” dog-killer, and their colleagues of robotics from Cambridge University in England continue working on the robot-conspirator, able to imitate the expressions of human emotion.
Development of a robot named Charles under the direction of Professor Cambridge University Peter Robinson is in 2015. During this time, the car was much better to recognize and imitate the expressions of the person.
Charles became a part of the program of the Department of computer science and technology, University of Cambridge. His collaborators explore different ways of interaction between humans and robots. They suggested that the presence of emotions in the responses of the machine will make “communication” more than usual.
“We were interested in whether the computer to understand social cues, facial expression, tone of voice, postures and gestures of the person. Thought it would be interesting to know, whether will repeat this robot. Whether people are more likely to cooperate with him, if the responses of the machine will be more emotion? So we have Charles,” explained Professor Robinson.
However, despite all attempts to force the robot to smile or frown as the man, Charles still looks pretty weird.
“Charles is incredibly realistic. The design is striking, but despite this, mechanical motors can’t compete with these muscles. Our programs controlling facial expression, is far from ideal. Analytical software can not be called perfect, so facial expression looks so unnatural,” says Professor Robinson.
Facial muscles Charles 24 control of the motor. The robot can move my eyebrows, mouth, jaw and other parts of the structure. The signal to them comes from the computer on which you installed the software that analyzes data from video cameras. It removes the human face and sends the picture to PC. The whole process takes no more than three seconds.
“Most people who see it, say it “unnatural” that, in turn, clearly shows that people are able to notice when the facial expressions of the person something changes. We immediately begin to suspect that something is wrong.”
However, according to Robinson, even in this form, Charles is interested in people more than the usual robot.
“Everybody just liked him. Show it at the open day, and around instantly gather a crowd,” says robotics.
Cambridge robotics create a robot facial expressions
Nikolai Khizhnyak