UK scientists create humanoid robot that can mimic human facial
expressions.

BRISTOL, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (NOVEMBER 26, 2008) REUTERS -
In Bristol, scientists are making headway on something more at home
in a science-fiction movie than in the quaint southwestern English city.
Scientists have produced a humanoid robot that can mimic human facial
expressions and lip movements in a startingly natural manner.

The androgynous robotic head, known as 'Jules', copies movement and
expressions of a human face by converting video image into digital commands
that make the robot's 34 servo motors produce mirrored movements.
A project developed by Phd student Peter Jaeckel, Jules is able to
interpret commands at 25 frames per second and use ten stock human emotions
including happiness and sadness.

"Jules is about creating artificial facial expressions and also
being able to read expressions from humans. So in a human-human interaction,
we look at facial expression all the time to gain cues about emotional state
and whether we're ready to start an interaction, these sorts of things - we do
this seamlessly and easily -- and we want to get an artificial system to be
able to do the same sort of thing," Chris Melhuish, head of the Bristol
Robotics Laboratory (BRL), run by the University of the West of England and
the University of Bristol, explained.

Melhuish says that Jules and another project 'Birt', which looks at
robots tracking human gaze and and understanding hand gestures, are part of a
bigger and a key theme of BRL's research which looks at human-robot
interaction specifically in a care situation.

"What we're interested is robots that actually get close to human
beings and work cooperatively with them. An obvious example for that would be
a care robot, a robotic system which would help somebody who was infirm,
perhaps, or disabled possibly or recovering from some injury," Melhuish
said.

"It needs to be smart enough to know that when it's handed you the
hot drink, that you actually are paying attention and that you know that the
drink is hot, you know that it's been handed to you, you know that you are
telling the robot then to let go of something. It needs all the smarts that
you've got to be able to do that safely. So, Jules and Burt are little facets
of that much bigger initiative or theme that we are working on in the Bristol
Robotics Laboratory," Melhuish said.

Melhuish says he doesn't believe that Jules is the first humanoid robot
able to mimic human facial expression but says what BRL's advances in the
research are in making the movements more natural and life-like.

The head was developed in the U.S. by American specialist in robotics,
David Hanson and is made of a flexible rubber skin known as 'Frubber'.

Melhuish says we need to understand human-robot interaction a lot more,
if one day robots are to play a larger role in our everyday life where, he
says, and contrary to the idea generated by science fiction movies, he
believes the majority won't be humanoid.