Guy Hoffman, a professor at Sibley’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and his students at the Human-Robot Collaboration and Fellowship Laboratory have created a prototype of a robot that can express “emotions” through changes in its external surface.
How Emotional RobWorks?
It has a skin with texture units whose shapes are controlled by fluid actuators and has documented the entire process in the document “Modulation of soft skin texture for social robots”, presented in April at the International Conference on Robotics in Livorno, Italy.
Hoffman already spoke at TEDx about “Robots with a soul”, and it has been viewed almost 3 million times. He said that the inspiration for designing a robot that emits non-verbal signals through its skin comes from the animal world and that we should not copy what humans do and should look for another way to interact.
The robot’s design has a series of two shapes, goose bumps and spikes, which correspond to different emotional states. The engineering team tested two different actuation control systems, minimizing the size and noise level as a driving factor in both designs, verifying how skins change their texture according to their “emotional state”.
Future challenges include scaling the technology to fit into an autonomous robot and making the technology more responsive to the robot’s immediate emotional changes.
Here you have it on video:
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