Robot Communicates With Just Eyes
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 16 of April , 2009 at 4:12 am
Faces are very complex and hard to effectively duplicate, as we’ve seen over and over. Really, at this stage in robotics development, the best idea is to just ditch the human face all together and focus on specific features which communicate information. And in humans, that’s the eyes. Yoichi Yamazaki from the Hirota Lab at the University Of Toyko has developed a robot that communicates exclusively through eye movements, which is important, since that’s all the robot is: a pair of eyeballs with some eyelids attached.
Eyes have a wide range of nonverbal signals, ranging from “hey baby” to “get away from me you creep.” The robot eyes have no problem being just as expressive, but the tricky part is determining what connotation goes with what particular position. Researchers put their eye robot to the test by asking volunteers to evaluate random expressions, and used the results to create a matrix that associates those expressions with particular emotions. This information will eventually be connected to a speech recognition and synthesis program that ideally will be able to interpret and reproduce both verbal and nonverbal communication, something that robots, so far, really suck at.
[ Yoichi Yamazaki ] VIA [ MIT ]
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Category: Research
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