Humanoid Robots with Facial Sentiment Reading are Close
The Ameca Robot's realistic facial gestures are impressive
On Data Science Learning Center I like to write about programing, data science and tech, but also some pretty random things. This is such an article.
Every since Elon Musk mentioned Tesla considered the Optimus general purpose robot important to the company’s future, it’s put humanoid robots a bit more front and center.
In this article I wanted to explore this from the angle of Ameca.
Ameca is the world’s most advanced human shaped robot representing the forefront of human-robotics technology, according to their website.
The Verge profiled them and had one sentance that jumped out at me:
In one video, Ameca frowns as an off-screen employee reaches out to touch its nose before smoothly reaching up to stop his arm in a whir of electric motors. It’s an uncanny moment that sets off alarm bells for the viewer: the shock is that a robot would want to establish this boundary between it and us — a desire that is, ironically, very human.
The video where this occurs is here.
A humanoid robot with both facial gestures and facial recognition sentiment reading of people would feel quite different, for a robot. We are likely now just years away from this tech being consumer friendly.
While in some countries sex-robots will be a big deal, in most places human robots could help with chores and offer some semblance of companionship for aging boomers and rapidly aging GenX, accelerated a bit due to the pandemic.
Footage of Engineered Arts’ most recent creation, a gray-skinned bot named Ameca, went viral last December with clips showing an android with an exposed metal torso and eerily realistic facial expressions interacting with researchers.
Another YouTube about it really is pretty impressive: I actually like the grey toned skin color. It gives the robot a lot of character that is also distinct from (most) humans.
The CNET interview has 1.8 million views a few months later.
Robots could help with our mental health as well, in ways we have yet to fully admit as a society. Robots like pets, could help reduce ironically, technological loneliness. It’s a bit of a paradox.
Created by British company Engineered Arts, Ameca went viral after it was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022. “We were incredibly surprised,” says Morgan Roe, Engineered Arts’ director of operations. “Overnight, it became a sensation. We got 24 million views on one Twitter post.”
Clearly there’s something about emotionally fluent humanoid Robots that might be a hit with humans.
Ameca uses 17 individual motors and is built from 3D in-house scans of real people which allows it to imitate human bone structure, skin texture, and expressions.
Engineered Arts also learned from their last project, Mesmer, that making a robot look a little less lifelike in some regards, by exposing more mechanical parts and coloring it grey, can actually be a positive.
Tesla’s humanoid robot will one day be the most valuable part of the company’s business, CEO Elon Musk predicted on April 21st, 2022. I actually think Elon is being serious.
An emotionally expressive humanoid robot feels more friendly and approachable. It’s these emotions — curiosity, fear, excitement — that are Engineered Arts’ stock-in-trade.
As for Optimus, Musk said that the first models of the bipedal robot would arrive next year, though experts are skeptical about that timetable. Elon has a rather poor history with promising dates for much of anything and especially Tesla’s FSD and various SpaceX milestones.
What will become of robotics companies in the future? Clearly as helpers in the home, in manufacturing or even construction they could be useful. Ameca is designed specifically as a platform for development into future robotics technologies, Ameca is the perfect humanoid robot platform for human-robot interaction, say its makers. Time will tell. Time will tell what place people give robots in our society as a whole.
Ameca is a neat cheerleader to be honest, but who will become the robot devs? So you want to build robots? That won’t be a problem in a just a few years.
Ameca is a Robot Building Platform
The main purpose of Ameca is to be a platform for developing AI. They love designing and building robots, and they’ll leave it to you and all the other amazing (naturally intelligent) brains out there to create the AI and machine learning algorithms and see how far we can progress the technology together.
Ameca’s strength is the emotional variety of its facial gestures. However other robotic companies do the hard stuff like actually moving. If Ameca is bringing to mind movies like I Robot and the possible downfall of humanity, don’t worry, the company says it won’t have anything close to a production model for another 10 years. The robot is also not designed to run, jump, or do any sort of quick movements (it can’t even walk yet) like some other robots, so if you ever feel uncomfortable, at least you can just run away from it.
Anyway guys, I just thought it was mildly entertaining, all if fair and well in code, robots and data science. See you next time!
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Excellent article Michael, thanks. In one way its scary right, but I'm always optimistic when I think about new tech or science developments. Add AI in all this and next years look amazing. Bring them on.