Italian Robot Attempts to Bridge the Uncanny Valley With Facial Expression
To create a robot we are more likely to accept, life-like expressions are vital. That’s why Nicole Lazzeri at the University of Pisa, Italy, and her colleagues have designed a “Hybrid Engine for Facial Expressions Synthesis” (HEFES) - a facial animation engine that gives realistic expressions to a humanoid robot called FACE.
FACE’s appearance is modelled on one of the team’s wives. “It’s really realistic,” says Lazzeri, who presented the work at BioRob in Rome last month. See for yourself in the video above. To mimic the myriad expressions that facial muscles are capable of achieving, the team placed 32 motors around FACE’s skull and upper torso that manipulate its polymer skin in the same way that real muscles do.
To create expressions they used a combination of motor movements based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) - a system created over 30 years ago which codes facial expressions in terms of anatomic muscle movements.
HEFES is used to control FACE’s expressions. It is essentially a mathematical programme that creates an “emotional space” which a person can use to choose an expression for FACE that exists anywhere between one or more basic emotions, including anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The algorithm then works out which motors need to be moved to create that expression or transition between two or more.
The team obviously has a great deal of work to do, but the approach is interesting
(via One Per Cent: Expressive face helps robot bridge ‘uncanny valley’)
Forty Years in The Uncanny Valley
More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, then a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years it received almost no attention.
Creepy Robot Head Reads Music and Sings
Chyi-Yeu Lin and colleagues at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei created a robot that first takes a photo of the music, which is notated with numbers and words, using cameras built into the eyes. An algorithm extracts pitch, rhythm, and lyrics from that image and sends the information to a voice synthesiser. The synthesiser matches sounds in the Mandarin language with the Roman spellings of the lyrics. Then, in a sudden burst of activity, the robot begins to sing, its mouth opening and closing with the words.
