Although facial expression plays a huge role in building trust, most robots still have a blank
Researchers from the Creative Machines laboratoryLab at Columbia Engineering has been working for five years to create EVA, a new autonomous robot with a soft, expressive face that responds to match the expressions of people nearby.
“The idea for EVA took shape a few years ago whenmy students and I began to notice that robots in our lab were looking at us through plastic eyes, ”recalls Hod Lipson, professor of innovation.
Lipson noticed a similar trend ingrocery store, where he encountered robot replenishers wearing name badges and, in one case, wearing a cozy hand-knitted cap. “People seemed to humanize their robot counterparts by giving them eyes, a personality, or a name,” the scientist says. “This got us thinking, if eyes and clothes work, why not create a robot with a super-expressive and responsive human face?”
The first phase of the project began in the laboratoryLipson several years ago, when undergraduate student Zanwar Faraj led a team to create a physical robot mechanism. They designed EVA to be a disembodied bust, much like the silent but animated Blue Man performers. EVA can express six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise, as well as a variety of more subtle emotions, using artificial "muscles" that act on specific points on the face, mimicking the movements of more than 42 tiny muscles attached to the face. various points to the skin and bones of human faces.
"The biggest challenge in creating EVA"The goal was to develop a system that would be small enough to fit within the human skull, yet functional enough to produce a wide range of facial expressions," Farage said.
Once the team is satisfied with the mechanicsEVA, they embarked on the second main phase of the project: programming the artificial intelligence that will control the EVA's facial movements. While lifelike animatronic robots have been used in theme parks and movie studios for years, Lipson's team has made two technological advances. EVA uses deep learning artificial intelligence to "read" and then display the expressions it sees on nearby people. And EVA's ability to mimic a wide variety of different human facial expressions is learned through trial and error by watching videos of itself.
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