Geminoid F: Robot or real woman?
The picture you see below is not of a real woman but of a recent creation of Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, an android robot named Geminoid F.
On the 2nd April’12 Geminoid F made its first public appearance in china. Geminoid F is a female android. The new robot is a copy of a woman in her twenties with long dark hair and it can produce smiles and even enigmatic, quizzical expressions, using mechanical actuators underneath her rubber 'skin'.
Her creator says his goal is to create a robot that can fool people into believing it's a human being. And this new android can certainly fool us for a while, with an illusion of it being a real woman and not a robot.
Geminoid F looks like a human being and represents the most intelligent generation of robots to date.
Geminoid F was produced by Hiroshi Ishiguro, a renowned robot designer at Osaka University in western Japan, whose androids come with a steep $1.2 million price tag.
Geminoid F is cheaper - just $110,000, which Ishiguro hopes may take the technology closer to the mainstream.
She can smile, furrow her brows and move her mouth - although she often looks rather dazed. It can also talk and sing - playing recordings, or 'mouthing' other people's voices.
Geminoid TMF is equipped with 12 motorised actuators, powered by air pressure, which allow her to 'copy' 65 facial expressions of a human.
Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University, Ishiguro last made international headlines in 2006 when he made an android replica of himself, the Geminoid HI-1. For his pioneering work, CNN named him one of eight “geniuses who will change your life,” and the BBC chronicled his story in the 2008 documentary Man-Machine. Ishiguro says his new robot F, as he’s named her, is more elegant and approachable than his past creations.
The biggest difference between Ishiguro’s copy of himself and F are the number of actuators, or motor-like mechanisms, that control behaviors. Geminoid HI-1 boasts about 50, while F has only 12. This has dropped the cost from more than $1 million to $110,000, which Ishiguro hopes will help popularize the product. Scientists were able to simulate human-like behaviors using electronic signals in the robot’s built-in computer. The robotic twin can smile, frown and furrow her eyebrows, but most of the time the silicone-skinned clone just looks a little dazed.
Geminoid F is already hard at work. She had a brief acting stint when she performed onstage at the Tokyo Art Festival, and she recently modeled clothes as part of a Tokyo department-store window display. Of course, it’s impossible to predict how people will use robots as they become more mainstream, but Ishiguro says the practical applications of F are endless. She could be used as a mannequin, a substitute teacher or a hostess. “We can’t predict all of the ways people will use the robots,” Ishiguro says. “We give the technology, but we don’t control the application.”
The professor has said that one day robots could fool us into believing they are human.
