麻豆传媒

Robotics engineers at the University of Bristol, UK, have been grimacing a lot recently, thanks to their copycat robotic head, Jules, which can mimic the facial expressions and lip movements of a human being.

Jules is an animatronic head produced by US roboticist , who builds uniquely expressive, disembodied heads with flexible rubber skin that is moved by 34 servo motors.

Human face movements are picked up by a video camera and mapped onto the tiny electronic motors in Jules鈥� skin.

The Bristol team developed its own software to transfer expressions recorded by the video camera into commands to make those servos produce similarly realistic facial movements.

However, because the robot鈥檚 motors are not identical to human facial muscles, some artistic licence was required. After filming an actor making a variety of expressions indicating, say, 鈥渉appiness鈥�, an expert animator selected 10 frames showing different variations of the expression and manually set the servos in Jules鈥檚 face to match.

鈥楿ncanny valley鈥�

That training was used to create software that can translate what it sees on video into equivalent settings of Jules鈥檚 facial motors. The robot can now do this in real time, at 25 frames per second.

Copycat robot heads have been created before, but not with realistic human-looking faces. For example, the robot developed at MIT in the United States has complex facial expressions, but a mechanical metal face that looks like a Muppet version of the Terminator robot.

Jules鈥� human appearance makes getting the expressions perfect even more critical, to avoid the notorious 鈥�uncanny valley鈥�. This describes the way that human-like robots or animations that are not quite true-to-life are perceived as unnerving, while less realistic versions, perhaps looking very mechanical, are less alarming.

鈥淲e are really attuned to how a face moves, and if it鈥檚 slightly wrong, it gives us a feeling that the head is somehow creepy,鈥� explains , who led the research.

Fake friends

鈥淩esearch has shown that if you have a robot that has many human-like features, then people might actually react negatively towards it,鈥� agrees , a robotics researcher at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK, who calls Jules鈥� copycat routine 鈥渧ery impressive鈥�.

But reaching the other side of the uncanny valley 鈥� achieving such realism that people react to robots as they do to humans 鈥� would have significant benefits, says Campbell.

Human communication relies heavily on facial expressions, so robots that can mimic them well should find much wider application. He anticipates that this would make them useful in healthcare settings, such as nursing homes.

However Dautenhahn questions the ethical implications of using very human-like robots for more than entertainment.

鈥淚f you expose vulnerable people, like children or elderly people, to something that they might mistake for human, then you would automatically encourage a social relationship,鈥� she told 麻豆传媒. 鈥淭hey might easily be fooled to think that this robot not only looks like a human and behaves like a human, but that it can also feel like a human鈥� and that鈥檚 not true.鈥�

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