Emo – the robot can smile back at you

Researchers have created a robot that can smile back – in a human way.

Emo, the robot, has been designed to mimic facial expressions and can pick up subtle clues in human facial expressions – and it uses this information to predict what your face is about to do.

AI has become eerily good at mimicking human conversations, but their robot counterparts are lagging behind in visually showing human emotions.

So researchers at Columbia University have been working on improving their robot reflexes down to the millisecond, and now Emo can smile, as well as anticipate and mirror human facial expressions, within 840 milliseconds.

The researchers, who were led by AI and robotics expert Dr Hod Lipson created a realistic robot head that had 26 separate actuators – a component that can cause movement – to create tiny facial expressions.

Emo’s pupils also contain high-resolution cameras which follow the eyes of its conversation partner.

The researchers even constructed a silicone skin, to make Emo look more, well, human.

The team also developed two AI models, with one predicting human facial expressions and the other one generating commands to use the matching facial expressions.

Then, the team trained Emo.

Emo was placed in front of a camera and did a series of random movements. After a few hours, the robot learned the relationship between their facial expressions and the motor commands.

Mr Yuhang Hu, Columbia Engineering PhD student and study lead author, said: ‘I think predicting human facial expressions accurately is a revolution in [human-robot interactions].

‘Now, the robot can integrate human facial expressions as feedback. When a robot makes co-expressions with people in real-time, it not only improves the interaction quality but also helps in building trust between humans and robots.

‘In the future, when interacting with a robot, it will observe and interpret your facial expressions, just like a real person.’

At the moment, Emo can only interact with people by analysing their human facial expressions, however, the team hope to combine the physical abilities with a large language model system such as ChatGPT.

Then maybe, Emo will be able to have more human interactions than we expect from a robot.

The study is published in the journal Science Robotics.

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