reportage
Human-like robots are more and more sophisticated Humanoid robots have long been sci-fi characters, but they are perfecting every day. Engineered Arts, a UK-based designer, and manufacturer of such robots, recently showed off one of its most life-like creations with its last bot Ameca, which can display what appears to be the most human-like facial expressions by a robot to date.
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ngineered Arts, the company behind Mesmer robot series, has unveiled a new creation that may weird you out even more. “Ameca is a new humanoid robot that does not have realistic hair and skin like Mesmer, but can instead show more human-like, natural-looking expressions than others we’ve seen,” as The Verge has reported. In a video posted by Engineered Arts on Youtube, Ameca first displays confusion, as it appears to wake up as if it were surprised by its existence. Then it seems surprised to see the viewer or camera, and finishes the video with a smile and welcoming hand gesture. The improvements in facial animation look to result from more fluid movements than we’ve seen before. By contrast, the Mesmer “Fred” robot had decent head movements but looks like he just had a shot of Novocain in his entire lower face when he speaks. Ameca appears to have a fully articulated head, face, neck, shoulders, arms, and hands, but Engineered Arts notes that “none of its robots can walk” - though the company is studying that capability. It’s unclear how Ameca’s facial expressions were animated, but some form of motion capture seems a good bet. The company said that Ameca is a “platform for developing Artificial Intelligence” but lets others develop the necessary machine learning algorithms. Engineered Arts have previously said that it uses “powerful, silent, high-torque” motors to drive Mesmer’s body and head movements, with everything designed from scratch to work together perfectly. It also uses sensors like cameras, depth sensors, LiDAR, and microphones.
20 - VOICES
