While in America Boston Dynamics is perfecting its SpotMini robot, gradually turning it into a "real" killer dog, their fellow robotics at the University of Cambridge in England continue to work on a conspiratorial robot that can mimic the expression of human emotions.
The development of a robot named Charles under the guidance of University of Cambridge professor Peter Robinson has been going on since 2015. During this time, the machine has become much better at recognizing and repeating human facial expressions.
Charles became part of the program of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Cambridge. Its employees are exploring the different ways humans and robots interact. They hypothesized that having emotion in the machine's responses would make "communication" more familiar.
“We wondered if the computer would be able to understand social cues, facial expressions, tone of voice, posture and gestures. We thought it would be interesting to know if the robot repeats this. Will people interact with him more often if there is more emotion in the machine's responses? That's how we got Charles,”explained Professor Robinson.
However, despite all the attempts to make the robot smile or frown like a human, Charles still looks rather strange.
“Charles is incredibly realistic. The design is amazing, but even so, mechanical motors cannot compete with real muscle. Our facial control software is far from ideal. Analytical software is also not perfect, which is why facial expressions look so unnatural,”says Professor Robinson.
Charles's facial muscles are driven by 24 motors. The robot can move its eyebrows, mouth, jaw and other parts of the structure. The signal to them comes from a computer with installed software that analyzes data from a video camera. She captures a human face and sends the picture to a computer. The whole process takes no more than three seconds.
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“Most of the people who see him note his“unnaturalness”, which, in turn, shows well that people are able to notice when something changes in a person’s facial expressions. We immediately begin to suspect that something is wrong with this person."
However, according to Robinson, even in this form, Charles is more interested in people than an ordinary robot.
“Everyone is just fascinated by him. Show it at the open house, and a crowd will instantly gather around,”the robot technician comments.