A robot that can grin back in a human-like manner has been developed by researchers.
The robot Emo was created to imitate human facial emotions. It is able to discern minute details in these expressions and utilize this data to anticipate your next move.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become uncannily adept at simulating human speech, but robots still have a long way to go in representing human emotions graphically.
Emo can now anticipate and mimic human facial expressions in 840 milliseconds, thanks to Columbia University researchers’ ongoing efforts to improve robot reflexes down to the millisecond.
The researchers, who were led by AI and robotics expert Dr Hod Lipson created a realistic robot head that had 26 separate actuators – a component that can cause movement – to create tiny facial expressions.
Emo’s pupils also contain high-resolution cameras which follow the eyes of its conversation partner.
The researchers even constructed a silicone skin, to make Emo look more, well, human.
Then, the team trained Emo.
Emo was placed in front of a camera and did a series of random movements. After a few hours, the robot learned the relationship between their facial expressions and the motor commands.
Mr Yuhang Hu, Columbia Engineering PhD student and study lead author, said: ‘I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in [human-robot interactions]
‘Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback. When a robot makes co-expressions with people in real-time, it not only improves the interaction quality but also helps in building trust between humans and robots.
‘In the future, when interacting with a robot, it will observe and interpret your facial expressions, just like a real person.’
At the moment, Emo can only interact with people by analysing their human facial expressions, however, the team hope to combine the physical abilities with a large language model system such as ChatGPT.
Then maybe, Emo will be able to have more human interactions than we expect from a robot.
