David Hanson of Hanson Robotics shows off his robotic research at his TED Talk Conference with a demo of his “Einstein” creation whose facial features mimic human expressions.
Hanson and his team’s goal is to eventually design a robot that not only realistically mimics human characteristics but that can empathize with us as well. They are doing so with the help of a variety of technologies that converge into the robotics that can be seen in his design featured in the video below. This includes very advanced expression recognition software that allows Hanson’s robots to recognize and emulate human facial expressions.
One field of robotics that has grown exponentially since the inception of robotic expression recognition software is companion robotics. Teams all over the world are working on developing artificial intelligence that can learn and grow as time progresses so that they can interact and aid the human population.
To see how emotion recognition robots are advancing check out some newer projects presented in Robots Read Facial Expressions? and Italian Technology: Emotional Androids?