Kismet, the robot head created by engineers at MIT already reproduced some human expressions. But the fact is that metal was not as successful an imitation of the human face as Jules, another robot head, but this time rubber. Developed by an American robotics, David Hanson and a team of robotics engineers in the University of Bristol, Jules is able to imitate the expressions of men who observe and movements of their lips.

The skin of the humanoid moves through thirty-four servomotors. The movements of the individual who is registered by a camera. Dedicated software had to be designed to turn these images external to activate the motor system. The servo does not work as the muscles of the face, it took a few liberties. The services of a player have been sought.

Participation of an actor
This was filmed in the process of mimicking various expressions indicating happiness, anger and so on. A specialist in animation was then required to manually activate the engines suitable for every time a picture of expression it was submitted. This training was necessary for the development of software to automatically mimic the movements observed. Jules now reproduced most of the expressions in real time. It is capable of recording more than twenty per second. Jules realism is so striking that it may make them uncomfortable, recalling in this regard, the phenomenon known as “valley of the strange”, a theory developed in Japan in 70 years. According to this theory, most human beings would not be afraid of robots as they do not look much but they would be hampered in the case of humanoid extremely realistic, if only to the extent that they suffer always defects, even minimal.

“Uncanny Valley”
“We are very attentive to expressions of a face and a tiny implausibility may be sufficient to destabilize us,” says the New Scientist Kerstin Dautenhahn, a robotics researcher at the University of Hertfordshire. The authors explain that achieving Jules across the valley, ie inventing robots rigorously indistinguishable from a physical point of view of human beings, is nevertheless very useful in areas such as medical care or at home. Communication between robots and people to whom they render services would be facilitated. Kerstin Dautenhahn preferred for its part question the ethical implications of such use of humanoid being totally illusion “expose vulnerable individuals, such as children or elderly people, to machines that could be mistaken for real human beings and therefore they could focus seems problematic as well. ”