Washington, July 9 (Inditop.com) A hyper-realistic Einstein robot has learned to smile and frown through a process of self-guided learning, according to a latest study.
University of California, San Diego (UCSD), researchers used machine learning to “empower” their robot to learn to make realistic facial expressions.
“As far as we know, no other research group has used machine learning to teach a robot to make realistic facial expressions,” said Tingfan Wu from UCSD.
The Einstein robot head at UCSD performs asymmetric random facial movements as a part of the expression learning process. The faces of robots are increasingly realistic and the number of artificial muscles that controls them is rising.
In light of this trend, UCSD researchers from the Machine Perception Lab (MPL) are studying the face and head of their robotic Einstein in order to find ways to automate the process of teaching robots to make lifelike facial expressions.
This Einstein robot head has about 30 facial muscles, each moved by a tiny servo motor connected to the muscle by a string.
Today, a highly trained person must manually set up these kinds of realistic robots so that the servos pull in the right combinations to make specific facial expressions.
In order to begin to automate this process, the UCSD researchers looked to both developmental psychology and machine learning.
Developmental psychologists speculate that infants learn to control their bodies through systematic exploratory movements, including babbling to learn to speak.
Initially, these movements appear to be executed in a random manner as infants learn to control their bodies and reach for objects, said an UCSD release.
“We applied this same idea to the problem of a robot learning to make realistic facial expressions,” said Javier Movellan, senior study author.
Although their preliminary results are promising, the researchers note that some of the learned facial expressions are still awkward.
The study was presented June 6 at the International Conference on Development and Learning.
