Meet FACE, the most 'humane' robot ever

London: Scientists have edged closer to their goal of creating a human-like robot as they have designed one that can display dozens of human emotions ranging from happiness to fear.

The female robot has been aptly named as FACE.

Drawing on 30 years of research, scientists from the University of Pisa, have built a robot that uses 32 motors in her face to simulate different expressions, to the point where she looks almost realistic enough to pass for a human.

[caption id="attachment_379308" align="alignleft" width="380"] Drawing on 30 years of research, scientists from the University of Pisa, have built a robot that uses 32 motors in her face to simulate different expressions.[/caption]

The university team, led by doctoral student Nicole Lazzeri from Pisa, modelled the robot on one of his team member's wives -and the team says 'it's very realistic', reported the Daily Mail.

The team used a software called Hybrid Engine for Facial Expressions Synthesis (HEFES), which has been built up over the last 30 years to mimic human emotional responses.

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The robot tells the motors how to respond in order to recreate a look, and the software can mix the various emotions on a sliding scale, for instance a smile tinged with sadness, or a laugh mixed with unease.

This last expression might be apt for those people who get trapped in the 'uncanny valley'. The principle of the valley is that people do not have an issue with humanoid robots when they do not look human- for instance, when they have metallic faces or expressionless faces.

If a robot is undetectable as a robot, then the illusion is not broken, and people can interact with the robot.

But if the robot looks very close to human, yet is given away by tell-tale signs, it makes most people startled and very uneasy -which, if you plot on a graph of human reactions to robots, creates the 'uncanny valley'.

Researchers reportedly asked five autistic and 15 non-autistic children to identify a set of expressions performed by FACE, and then the same expressions performed by a psychologist.

Both groups could identify happiness, anger and sadness, but they struggled more with fear, disgust and surprise.

PTI