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meet amica it's clearly robotic and also
well very human-like
the uncanny valley when something
artificial triggers a feeling which can
go from super cute
to super creepy happens in an instant
but there are actually two uncanny
valleys one static
and one for motion
and this team of designers and
roboticists think they figured out how
to avoid the fall
we have this really strong notion of
biological motion so you very very
rarely mistake a machine for a living
thing and we wanted to play with that
idea
so what is it about the way that a
machine moves that will make you believe
in it as if it's alive wire talk with
will jackson founder and ceo of
engineered arts to understand how they
design
prototype and test their humanoid robots
[Music]
cracking the code of dynamic movement
has been a continuous journey of
prototypes and designs for engineered
arts amica is their latest instead of
being sort of photorealistic we're more
concerned about
what is the essence of being human and
it's not just visual it's it's this
dynamic data it's this movement data
if you come close what what should
happen
um
so we have
a
change in expression so the the focus of
the eyes comes in tighter
i think we went through
10 different attempts of getting a smile
and it was just trying to get the the
crease in the in the skin when when the
robot smiles that was really difficult
and those creases in the brow as well so
we ended up having to add various fibers
and parts that would tension the skin
inside part of what the programmers here
are doing is
they're studying people and looking at
how people behave and how can we can
mimic these kind of behaviors why do we
do that it's a communication tool so if
the robot behaves in the way you expect
and it makes expressions that you
understand you can do a lot of powerful
communication with that you know you go
to the cinema
and you don't look at the screen and say
oh look some red pixels and some blue
pixels you immerse into it and you you
become part of that story what we're
doing is taking that kind of willing
suspension of disbelief and putting it
into the physical world amika is a
communication robot built to entertain
and educate
engineered arts focuses on designing the
gestures look and movement of the
robotic systems they leave the ai and
what's being said to the universities
and companies that buy them each unit
takes about 12 to 16 weeks to make and
costs between 120 and 500 000
so how do they do it
the first thing you learn is that you're
never going to match human so the first
thing you learn is how to deal with
disappointment so we were trying to
mimic the way that human vertebrae
worked and then these red cords here are
like the muscles there were six motors
on this as well so enormously big and
bulky problem is
that we have these incredibly effective
actuators human muscle is has this huge
power density
and very very fine force control this
one in front of me is a version two
so on paper this looked kind of cool and
i i drew it all out and i came back into
work and i saw it with a mechanical
design team and said
hey guys can you turn this into reality
and and it just didn't barely move at
all and then we realized
there was so much friction in all of
this complexity in all of this kind of
cable drive in here that just all the
power of the motors was lost
in this drive so i spent
maybe three four months just working on
this and then you just at the end of it
it's just like wow doesn't work at all
start again i think we actually went
through
seven different versions by the time we
got to this one we dropped the idea of
having seven vertebrae because we
realized you you couldn't actually see
it but human movement isn't just
affected by how our bones joints and
muscles move together but also by the
movement of our skin
you have
45 i think it is different facial action
units that you can do so it's everything
from a little tiny muscle pool in here
to
your inner brows middle brows outer
brows mouth corners how do they
transition from into a smile and then
back into a neutral expression so we did
a lot of work actually studying human
faces so these faces are made of
silicone
it tears really easily
so we end up having to put all kinds of
fibers and fabric and things inside that
gave it some more strength so it's a
kind of composite material the head is
actually used up with the motors for
driving the face and then we try to make
the skin as thin as we can so it goes
down to about one millimeter thick
their models are all made in-house
allowing ideas to go quickly from design
to production they categorize and record
every part they make if something
doesn't work now it may work later
amica is built on the years of learning
and design from earlier models
so robothespian was our first kind of
robot that was a hybrid pneumatic
electric robot which is quite an unusual
design we were really interested how can
we make a compliant robot how can we
make a robot that's safe around people
we did that with with the early ones by
using pneumatics so air is compressible
whereas
highly geared motors on you can't really
back drive them you there's no
transparency there you'll notice some of
the motion is quite jerky it's a little
bit clunky there is actually a very
small compressor inside amica which is
used for the arm balance mechanism so
the air is used more like a spring
within the system this is definitely
something we discovered with
robo-thespian you know 15 year old robot
for the using this hybrid pneumatic
electric approach to be
really efficient so this is alfred uh
he's currently dressed up as a surgeon
he's a mesmer type robot which means
he's got natural skin actually touching
his face there's actually stubble here
every little piece of hair on his face
is inserted manually even his wobbly
little earlobes so he's going to punch
me it's a very very different aesthetic
to amica so amica we wanted to make
robot as robot no pretence that it's
human and we were more concerned about
the movement with the mesmer type robots
uh they made her have a more human look
so we've got this soft
skin
and you see all these wrinkles on the
hands
emma got debuted in december 2021 the
team is still fine-tuning its design and
functionality with plans to perfect its
hands dexterity so all these subtle
things come
and kind of mean the thing doesn't work
so
what we
gained here was just knowledge
and and the knowledge is way more
important than whether it worked or not