The folks over at AIST opened the doors to their lab for a few days and showed off some of their robotics development and middleware. One of the robots on display was the Actroid-F, developed by Kokoro Co. Ltd and ATR. The operator’s facial expressions and head movements are tracked and replicated by the robot, and might we add that it looks very realistic, albeit slightly jerky. That being said, regardless of the advancements made in the last few years such as reducing the cost by a third and eliminating redundant actuators, it still can’t escape uncanny valley, which is a hypothesis in the field of robotics where a response of revulsion is evident amongst human observers when robots look and act almost like actual humans. If you’re wondering how lifelike this robot is, check out the video after the jump.
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