14 DAY TRIAL // UK robotics researchers have taken up the task of creating a robot that would reproduce human facial expressions most accurately, and it seems they succeeded. At least, they managed to give the robotic head created by David Hanson, a US professional in the field of robotics, the most human-resembling appearance and movement. Jules, the result of their combined efforts, is a bodyless talking robot head that can make use of its 34 under-skin servo motors in order to move its facial "muscles," such as lips, eyebrows or forehead.
The scientists from the University of Bristol have managed to develop a piece of software that would transmit images of a human face to the robot's "brain", which will appropriately adjust the motion of the engines, which in turn will move the rubber skin and the eyes in order for the robotic face to reflect the respective images. The way its face behaves, speech included, is very similar to that of a computer game character. In fact, the robot is so close to a human face that scientists are starting to fear the "uncanny valley" effect.
This effect refers to the fact that, the more human features are depicted in a machinery, the more people tend to be unnerved by it. As research leader Neill Campbell says, "We are really attuned to how a face moves, and if it's slightly wrong, it gives us a feeling that the head is somehow creepy." He is backed up in this statement by Kerstin Dautenhahn, a robotics expert from the UK's University of Hertfordshire, who states that "Research has shown that if you have a robot that has many human-like features, then people might actually react negatively towards it."
Jules' creators hope that a full-body robot with a head like Jules' may prove very useful for tasks like attending to old people or babies. But on the other hand, there are scientists who speak against this robot mixing with humans thing, and among them even Dautenhahn, who believes that "If you expose vulnerable people, like children or elderly people, to something that they might mistake for human, then you would automatically encourage a social relationship. They might easily be fooled to think that this robot not only looks like a human and behaves like a human, but that it can also feel like a human... and that's not true."