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A New Face For Robotics
tanmay writes "Android technology has moved a step forward with the creation of a high-tech polymer called 'f'rubber,' which resembles human skin. Its creator, David Hanson has implemented it in a robot called Hertz, as this report from CNN gives us the details. Another question that the report brings up is the need to make robots resemble humans. Ray Kurzweil thinks Hanson's work is significant because realistic facial movement will play an important role in the way future androids respond to humans, and has the following to say, 'Intelligence significantly below that of normal humans stands out more with a robot that looks strikingly human. This creates the impression of a human with impaired intelligence, which may strike some as disturbing.'"
Does it make you fly? Or bounce like a super-hero?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
That "f'rubber" looks pretty good in the initial testing phases. Not 100% human-like but close.
Trolling is a art,
...says that the first practical use of f'rubber will be in the sex aid industry. How long before we see Stepford Whores?
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
"Intelligence significantly below that of normal humans stands out more with a robot that looks strikingly human. This creates the impression of a human with impaired intelligence, which may strike some as disturbing." Put a blond wig an silicone breasts on it, and it not quite so disturbing...
The question is, do they dream of electronic sheep?
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
No, you say this angrily when a condom breaks. Like "Damn it broke! f'rubber!"
If you're lucky enough to meet her, try to ignore the tangle of wires slinking from behind her face. Ignore?!? hell it turns me on!! Grrrrr.
The "Uncanny Valley" is a neologism that expresses RK's statement. It's reasonably new in robotics research, as they've only recently gotten to the point where it can apply. See, e.g., http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html ... It's just a hope, of course, that it actually comes up on the other side!
This is clearly a blatant cash-in on the already successful 'flubber' invented by Walt Disney !
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
More realistic seeming skin could be a bonus not only for robotics as in AI, but as in prosthetics.
Artificial limbs can be made to seem more lifelike with such substance, making them less obtrusive for those who use them.
Things that look too human appear grotesque and disturbing, unless they're dead-nuts-on. Apparently there's an uncanny valley in parameter space, where things that are close to (but not exactly) human are disturbing and grotesque.
full text here: Follow that human
"Most people doing social robots believe that human faces will turn people off and will disturb them. I think that's ridiculous," Hanson said. "The human face is perhaps the most natural paradigm for us to interact with."
Most experts disagree. They cite one of the principles of social robotics, the so-called "Uncanny Valley" theory.
First described by pioneering Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, the theory goes like this: humans have a positive psychological reaction to robots that look somewhat like humans. But if a robot is made to look very realistic but somehow isn't quite right (it has an odd smile, or it doesn't blink, for example) it seems grotesque instead of comforting.
Sounds like just the kind of new invetion Abyss Creations has been waiting for. ;)
A Doctor Who episode The Robots of Death has a sub-plot involving 'robophobia'. It was a mental (illness) condition broguht on by close contact with entities that looked and acted human but had no emotions or expressions and were impossible for humans to 'read'. Of course, that's fiction. However, in the 1980's car makers added a 'feature' to luxury cars, where the car would 'speak' to the driver and passengers. ("A door is ajar! A door is ajar!"). People hated this, and it was quickly abandoned. I briefly had a rental car with a 'voice' - and found it annoying. I'm not sure that making machines look a little bit human is a good thing.
[Insert pithy quote here]
No, you say this angrily when a condom breaks.
Umm.. this is slashdot, no one here knows what's actually inside the boxes marked "Condoms" at the pharmacy.
Trolling is a art,
very realistic Elvis lookalikes.
My parents told me a while back that I was a rabid "Astro Boy"* fan when I was a wee tot. (A translated version of the cartoon played in the 'States in the late 60s.)
I barely remembered the show . . . but was curious enough after the 50th Anniversary noise last year to pick up the first volume of the collected comics. (I think Dark Horse is publishing them.)
The B&W art was very stylish and lively, but the stories were kind of juvenile.
One thing stood out**: In the beginning of the Origin Story, we're shown a brief history of robotics. The big breakthrough that made robots acceptable in everyday life:
Lifelike rubber skin!
Stefan
* Yeah, yeah, his real name is "Mighty Atom."
** Well, one other thing stood out. Astro Boy had a machine gun in his butt. Man, that's freaky.
Popular Science has a longer (and IMO better) article on the entire project. It was written September 2003. It's got interesting information on the "Uncanny Valley" -- robots are okay, unless they look very much but not quite human - they call it "walking corpse." Hanson hopes to get past that valley and build (at least) a head that is a perfect human imitation.
Your brain is not a computer.
I think that lifelike rubber skin is an attempt to push robots up the slope of the *right* side of the valley, toward human realism.
This is going to be really tough.
I would push the other way, toward "unfamiliar but intriguing." Make them clean and symmetrical, out of shiny materials.
Stefan
He gave 2-hour talk about the relationship between innovation, AI and biotech.
The coolest part was that his talk was a virtual talk - he was sitting at his office in Boston and was beamed over to a conference hall with ~2000 people. They had this curtain setup with a translucent concave reception dish that caught a projected video signal - I swear to god, from the back of the room, the only way that you knew he was a hologram and not a real person was that he was 'brighter' than the guy next to him. Even better, was that they had this camera that projected the people speaking onto a huge screen auditorium-type display and when you looked at that there was no way to tell that he wasn't physically there. The only thing that gave him away was the occasionally interrupted audio (must have been VOIP). I don't know if the video signal was analog or digital but I suppose it could have been either.
The core of his talk was that science in general (and machine AI in particular) is advancing 'exponentially' - that each new innovation provides us with new tools to accelerate progress. Cool shizzle. According to him, we'll see some incredible advances in the next 10 years.
All your base are belong to us!
But can it run a self-diagnostic?
Does it have an emotion chip?
Does it have an evil twin?
Now THAT'S an android.
Corporations: your universal scapegoat for all society's ills.
I don't know why we have an obsession with having our robots look human! In terms of usefulness they would be better off being built in a manner that best suits their purpose, not trying to pretend they're something they're not.
Consider movies like Toy Story, where they have animated humans that they've tried to make look real... of course it's easy to tell that they are not real, and in fact they have an element of unreality and unbelievability about them. I would connect more with a straight cartoon character, where there is no attempt to make them look real then I would with something that is trying to be real, but isn't quite.
"Its creator, David Hanson has implemented it in a robot called Hertz"
Hmm Hertz makes for a good last name, but what about a first name? It should be something celestial.. timeless... Oh, I know, how about Uranus?
"Derp de derp."
We all know the motivation behind robotss that bave skin/body parts that feel more realistic. OTOH, most geeks probably don't have a realistic benchmark to compare to.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Part of the annoyance was the lack of information - "Door ajar. Door ajar."
;) then it might not have been quite so annoying.
OK, which fscking door is it?!?
Also, this would start the instant the door was opened with the key in place. Had it dinged a couple of times first, then said "Driver's door ajar" or "Front right door ajar" (or for you who drive on the wrong side of the road, "Front left door ajar"
www.eFax.com are spammers
In the article they mention the 'Mori Uncanniness' problem- there is a point that is the 'most anthropomorphic' you can get, before the thing becomes about as pleasant as santorum. IANARS, but the RS's at CMU's Robotics Institute state in A Survey of socially interactive robots
FWIW There are many more issues than just cannyness, and that paper gets into a lot of em...
Lifelike skin? As soon as they can program this thing to take out the trash, my girlfriend will no longer have any use for me at all!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Umm.. SCO Management anyone?
-- Jim.
-- If at first you don't succeed, lie!
Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend.
What they don't mention is that his girlfriend is also a robot.
The enemies of Democracy are
Like his previous project, K-bot, Hanson sculpted Hertz to resemble his girlfriend.
This is either the sincerest form of flattery, or he's obsessively building a replacement for his girlfriend whose behaviour is controllable, and governed by logic.
It sort of makes you think...
Am I the ONLY one who thinks of the original Flubber movie instead of the one with Robin Williams? God I feel old.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Your request for human status has been denied.
Workaround in the USA: make a corporation owned by the robot's "family" that owns the robot's hardware and owns everything the robot "owns." Then you get a "person[] ... naturalized in the United States" and thus, under the corporate personhood interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, a "citizen[] of the United States."
Oh man! I didin't even KNOW there was an "original" Flubber movie. God you ARE old ;)
It is not at all disturbing, he was simpling showing how you and I are more likely to recognize that the computer has sub-human intelligence if the computer looks like a human.
... you might think it is a lot more intelligent than it is.
... maybe not if it didn't look human.
If the computer looked like something else, subconsciously you wouldn't have the direct link to appearance to use as a reference for the machine's smarts
Do you have any trouble identifying when a human obviously has low intelligence? no. Would you have trouble identifying when an android has low intelligence
see, nothing disturbing, just human nature.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Any sufficiently intelligent entity that is going to be implanted into a cybernetic body should be able to
1) Choose from a group of predesigned body shapes
or
Design their own from scratch (I'm sure eventually...)
2) Modify them afterwards depending on their judgements of reactions towards them.
IANAAI (Artificial Intelligence) but such entities may find that one of the greatest challenges to its own evolution and interaction with the physical or virtual reality at hand depends greatly on the appearance it takes.
Posthuman since 2001.
Bzzt! The Nutty Professor was a Jerry Lewis movie where he tried to impress a girl with a formula that made him handsome. (In the end, his mom ended up selling the formula after he decided to destroy it.) It was subject to a remake by Eddie Murphy who did a good job at destroying it.
:-/
The original "Flubber" movie was called "The Absent Minded Professor". I should know. My parents always called my by that name to poke at my absent mindedness.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It's candy right? They seem to mostly have flavors listed
Umm.. this is slashdot, no one here knows what's actually inside the boxes marked "Condoms" at the pharmacy. I resent that remark! I have actually opened them up, and let me tell you, the gum inside those packages tastes terrible!
With this upgrade, fewer people will suspect that he is a Disney Animatronic robot. He still needs an upgrade on his Natural Language Processing and Rhythm chips, though. I still voted for him. A robot controlled by Disney is better than one controlled by the Military Industrial complex.
;-)
Heh, I'm just begging for a smackdown from the mods with THAT comment! (of course, I'm protected from all but the smartest of them by that last sentence.)
Wait. Did I type that last parenthetical aside or just think it? (and that should cover the rest
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Resembling an animated corpse may be disturbing, but it shouldn't be forgotten that there's a really compelling reason to make humanoid robots:
Infrastructure.
It's a huge efficiency to make robots that are able to use all the stuff we've made specifically for humanoids (cars, stairs, doors, chairs, tables, vacuum cleaners, various handheld implements, segways =] ). If you make general purpose humanoid robot, you automatically get a chauffer, a maid, etc., that can use all the tools of the trade. Rather than needing special robot cars, special robot vacuums, etc.
Kinda OT, but the "anti-human-robot" sentiment set me off. Sorry.
grib.
maybe
The effort to make robots more human is funny. I'm laughing.
Anyone who has ever interacted with any robot, regardless of scale of the project, resemblance to humans, or application, can tell you that robots are STUPID.
Life-like faces are the last thing they need. Learning a language, learning how to walk on their own, object recognition, simultaneous localization and mapping, gripping, etc. are all in a pathetic state compared to what you read in CNN.
I mean, this is why I'm in the field: to improve it. But don't get your hopes up for this decade (and probably the next).
Robo-Blogs of the world: UNITE!
I met David Hanson two years ago at the AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada. He hung out with our robotics team for a couple days during the conference where he was demonstrating his (really freaky) robot heads and we were competing in the robot host competition. He's a very artistic guy, and about as enthusiastic as they come. I'm glad to see he's starting to make it big.
Funny thing is, the Ray Kurzweil (who was also at the conference) quote in the article sounds like a conversation I had with David. Our robot, built to serve hors d'oeuvres in a coctail party environment, was designed to look like a table, rather than a butler (Although it had a pan/tilt/zoom camera for a "head"). The idea was to improve on people's expectations of a table rather than disappoint people expecting a real human. Kurzweil's quote sounds like something I probably said to David: "Better to build a smart piece of furniture than a stupid human."
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
I don't know. Maybe it's just me but I like the way robots look. The mechanical movements and crude metal just make them look so cool and they should not try to make robots to imitate humans bt rather make robots to be the best robot for the job it is designed to do. I've always wondered why the robots in terminator had to have metal skulls like humans except for easthetic value. Why would you want to pull a rubber mask over a work of art to try and make it look more acceptable to a human? And someone will probably complain about the colour of the skins on them regardless of what the colour is...
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
Making robots resemble humans is, in my opinion, counter-productive.
:)
Instead, let's create facsimilies of creations such as Chii, from the Chobits anime. It's better to be on the artificial side of the uncanny valley, and make cute bishoujo robots
Who here WOULDN'T want a cute persocom as their assistant??!!
Visceral Psyche Films