Meet Charles, the mind-reading robot created to read human emotion in ground-breaking project
Meet Charles, the mind-reading robot created to read
human emotion in ground-breaking project
Top scientists at Cambridge University have been working
with Charles to find out if machines can respond to social cues as part of a
ground-breaking project
ByJames Laybourn and Jasmine Rapson 10:53, 25 MAR 2018
A world dominated by Artificial Intelligence may be
closer than we think after brain-box scientists created a 'mind reading' robot
that can mimic human emotions.
Happy, sad, confused or bored - researchers at Cambridge
University have built Charles to mimic all human expressions as part of a
ground-breaking project.
The scientists hoped to discover if the machines could
respond to the same social cues as humans and encourage people to engage with
the machines more, Cambridge News reports.
Charles is made up of a system of computer programmes
linked up to a camera - which can read people's faces.
The computer reads the positions of the face, including
the eyebrows, jaw and mouth, then sends the information over to Charles who
mimics the expression in just two to three seconds.
Professor Peter Robinson from the Department of Computer
Science and Technology, said: "We've been interested in seeing if we can
give computers the ability to understand social signals, to understand facial
expressions, tone of voice, body posture and gesture.
"We thought it would also be interesting to see if
the computer system, the machine, could actually exhibit those same
characteristics , and see if people engage with it more because it is showing
the sort of responses in it's facial expressions that a person would show. So
we had Charles made."
However Charles hasn't quite perfected the art of human
emotion just yet, as his control programmes are "not quite fine
enough" to look completely authentic, according to Prof Robinson.
He said: "Our control programmes are just not quite
fine enough and the monitoring of the human face we're using at the moment is
just not quite good enough and so it looks unnatural.
"Most people when they see this find it slightly
strange and that's actually an indication that people are very good at seeing
something wrong in somebody else's facial expression. It could be a sign that
they're ill or something else.
"People are absolutely fascinated by robots. Put a
robot on display at an open day people will crowd round and flock to see
it."
However, despite the fact technology is advancing at a
very high rate Prof Robinson remains confident that robots will not take over
the world.
"You just pull the plug out", he says.
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