Hey Good Looking

Despite all the controversy about whether or not we will require home robots to look human or not, technology that literally brings a human face to robots is moving forward at a rapid pace . Nowhere is robotics advancing as quickly as it is in Japan, where exciting projects are underway in their university labs. At one such lab in Tokyo, engineering students are wiring a rubbery robot face to simulate six basic human expressions - happiness, anger, fear, sadness, surprise and disgust. But it does more than create these expressions on command; it is connected to a database of words clustered by association and responds to various words, reacting to their meanings. For example, the robot—named Kansei (meaning sensibility)—reacts to the word “war” by quivering in a combination of fear and disgust. Why is this important? “To live among people, robots need to handle complex social tasks,’’ said project leader Junichi Takeno of Meiji University. “Robots will need to work with emotions, to understand and eventually feel them. Hiroshi Ishiguro—maker of the Geminoid robot—at Osaka University agrees. “In the end, we don’t want to interact with machines or computers. We want to interact with technology in a human way so it’s natural and valid to try to make robots look like us,’’ he said.