Slashdot Mirror
Android Copy of Danish Man Unveiled
An anonymous reader writes "The Geminoid family, a series of ultra-realistic androids, each a copy of a real person, has a new member: Geminoid DK, a robot clone of a Danish researcher and the most realistic Geminoid yet. The robot has lifelike facial features and movements, blinking, smiling, frowning with incredible realism. The Danish researcher, Henrik Scharfe of Aalborg University, teamed up with Japanese animatronics firm Kokoro and roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro to create his robot twin, which he plans to use to study human-robot interaction and cultural differences in the perception of robots. This is the first Geminoid that is not based on a Japanese person; it's also the first bearded one."
I was at first shocked at how realistic this was, but then I realized that I probably was thinking that because they didn't model as a young Japanese woman with perfect skin. Seriously, there are so many robot heads modelled that way, real young Japanese women are almost starting to seem robotic.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Android Copy of Danish Man Unveiled
OK, who else thought "Danish Man" was the name of game that's being ported to Android?
Ah yes. Japanese and Danes. The most expressive people on planet earth.
When they make an Italian, wake me up.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This robot is really just an animatronic device, like they have at Disneyland (or so I hear). It's controlled by someone behind the scenes using a computer. The purpose is to study how people interact with it, knowing that it's not real. The interesting thing about regular robots is that they're supposed to control themselves, and research concentrates not just on designing new kinds of sensors and actuators (limbs) and body plans, but especially the software to control them.
Still, it looks very impressive, but I'm not sure how this progresses the development of sensors, actuators, or control software. It seems more like a sophisticated crafts project to me. Are the researchers also going to have test subjects interact with a non-realistic human-shaped robot to see how they react to it, to compare with the realistic looking one?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
if he's a Scientologist then who cares?
Perfect - A movie starring Charlie Sheen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tom Cruise, where Cruise gets blown up. You could call it Mission:Impossible - Two and a Half Men!
surprisingly enough many people are almost the opposite.
If you get too far into the uncanny vally people can be hostile but stay well back and people will relate to machines just fine, they won't relate to them as people but they'll be fine thinking of them like really smart pets/animals.
I came across a lovely article a while back.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/05/AR2007050501009_pf.html
People are quite ready to treat machines as they would animals, even going so far as to consider something that's happening to a bot to be inhumane.
"The most effective way to find and destroy a land mine is to step on it.
This has bad results, of course, if you're a human. But not so much if you're a robot and have as many legs as a centipede sticking out from your body. That's why Mark Tilden, a robotics physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, built something like that. At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.
Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane. "
It might be easier to get people to bond to a machine as they would a guidedog rather than as they would to another human.
The veteran explosives technician looming over Bogosh was visibly upset. He insisted he did not want a new robot. He wanted Scooby-Doo back.
"Sometimes they get a little emotional over it," Bogosh says. "Like having a pet dog. It attacks the IEDs, comes back, and attacks again. It becomes part of the team, gets a name. They get upset when anything happens to one of the team. They identify with the little robot quickly. They count on it a lot in a mission."