How This Humanoid Robot Was Made | WIRED

[Music] 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 anika 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 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 browser to browse 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 could 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 weird lips always 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 his 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

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,193,102

Keywords: ameca, ameca engineered arts, ameca robot, engineered arts, engineered robots, how robots are made, humanoid robot, humanoid robot engineers, humanoid robots, humanoids, prototype robot, prototype robots, real robot, real robots, realistic robot, realistic robots, robot engineer, robot prototype, robots prototypes, robots realistic, robots wired, uncanny valley, uncanny valley humanoid robots, uncanny valley robots, wired, wired currents, wired robots

Id: 6iO6XhbVQfs

Length: 7min 36sec (456 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 22 2022