A Chinese scientist and his research team have developed a robot that can display highly expressive human-like facial features.
The robot was developed by Liu Xiaofeng, a Professor at Hohai University in East China’s Jiangsu Province and his research team and it is thought to have imbibed the feature after formulating a new algorithm for generating facial expressions on humanoid robots.
According to Liu, humanoid robots’ inability to replicate the nuanced and authentic facial emotions displayed by humans creates difficulties in captivating consumers.
Liu and his team tackled this problem by creating a comprehensive two-phase method to upgrade the range of realistic facial expressions that self-governing emotional robots can exhibit.
He revealed that their approach first created photos of complex robot facial expressions led by artificial units.
An effective robot was created in the second phase with many degrees of freedom for facial motions, allowing it to imitate the artificially generated fine-grained facial expressions.
The researchers said: “To preserve the integrity of AUs while mitigating identity interference, we leverage a latent facial attribute space to disentangle expression-related and expression–unrelated cues, employing solely the former for expression synthesis.
“In the subsequent phase, we actualize an affective robot endowed with multifaceted degrees of freedom for facial movements, facilitating the embodiment of the synthesized fine-grained facial expressions.”
