Meet this world’s most advanced humanoid robot, christened “Ameca,” which has been magnificently developed by a Cornwall-based firm, Engineered Arts “Falmouth.” This sophisticated robot has surpassed our expectations as it incredibly deploys its exceptional capabilities by mimicking the facial expressions of a researcher in an undeniably cool manner. The researcher deployed the program named “ARKit” on his iPhone 12, which enables you to capture a range of real-time gestures on the phone’s camera. Along with this, the researcher then embedded these motions into a 3D character that can be seen beside him in the phone’s camera. The motions of this 3D character were controlled and monitored by the researcher’s actions, which made this robot called a “virtual puppet.”
Coupled with this, as you can see in the pictures, the robot efficiently catches the facial expressions and movements of the researcher in the form of eyes rolling, pursed lips, gritted teeth, etc. Hence, Ameca is also capable of looking up, down, right, and left, thus projecting the movements of a researcher. Engineered Arts has regarded this robot as a “platform for human-robot interaction”. It further stated, “The aim here is to build the best expressive capabilities. Ameca is able to mimic the tiny subtleties of human expression. Yes, this is a real robot – no CGI in this video!”
In addition to this, the researcher tried different facial expressions intentionally, and that too in a fast manner, in order to analyze the catching capabilities of this robot, and you would be amazed to know that it efficiently copied all such expressions at the same pace as that of the researcher. There were some reports about the threats being generated due to artificial intelligence, and it was reported on YouTube last month. In response to this concern, Ameca said that they have been designed and programmed “to help and serve humans” and that there is “no need to worry”.
To that end, Engineered Arts stated, “Nothing in this video is pre-scripted – the model is given a basic prompt describing Ameca, giving the robot a description of self – it’s pure AI. The pauses are the time lag for processing the speech input, generating the answer and processing the text back into speech.” The company further said, “There are many hurdles to overcome before Ameca can walk. Walking is a difficult task for a robot, and although we have done research into it, we have not created a full walking humanoid.”