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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,
"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...
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!
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.
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.
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]
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.
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!
I'll let you join the dots...
$100.. says that the first practical use of f'rubber will be in the sex aid industry
and
realistic facial movement will play an important role in the way future androids respond to humans
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...
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...
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
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