Diego-San Crosses The Uncanny Valley

 Robotics

San Diego's Machine Perception Lab recently installed a robot built by Kokoro Co. Ltd. and Hanson Robotics, two companies that specialize in building lifelike androids. Diego-San will be used to study artificial intelligence and human-robot interaction, using the mechanical baby face to , promote empathy with the robot.

Following up on their work with Zeno robot last year, Hanson Robotics has just completed the installation of their newest humanoid robot head called Diego-San for the Machine Perception Lab at the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.

With a face by David Hanson and Hanson Robotics, which mounts on a body built by Kokoro Co., this robotic baby boy was built with funding from the National Science Foundation and serves cognitive A.I. and human-robot interaction research.

Diego-San sees people with high definition cameras in the eyes,  gestures, expressions, and uses A.I. modeled on human babies, to learn from people, the way that a baby hypothetically would.

According to the researchers, the facial expressions are important to establish a relationship, and communicate intuitively to people. As much a work of art as technology and science, this represents a step forward in the development of emotionally relevant robotics, building on previous work of David Hanson with the Machine Perception Lab on projects such as Bina48 and the Phillip K. Dick robot.



SOURCE  David Hanson's YouTube Channel

By 33rd Square

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