Disturbing Robot ‘Baby’ Makes Ultra-Realistic Faces – Smiles at the End of Mankind
Posted by Tony on January 9th, 2013In our article about the other new toddler robot called Roboy we mentioned Diego-san. Here’s your first look into the robotic wagon-train that’s leaving Uncanny Valley slowly but surely.
When John Connor shows up and SkyNet goes live it won’t be the T1000s we’re worried about.
Why?
We’ll be too terrified by something that’s already been here.
Robot babies.
And you can tear that cute baby robot picture off the wall of your imagination…because robot babies are about as far as you can get from being ‘cute’.
Because we’re not satisfied with making skeletal robots that look like mechanical grim reapers, the University of San Diego has created a ridiculously amazing and disturbingly realistic over-sized one-year-old in order to study the cognitive development of infants.
“Its main goal is to try and understand the development of sensory motor intelligence from a computational point of view. It brings together researchers in developmental psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, computer vision and robotics. Basically we are trying to understand the computational problems that a baby’s brain faces when learning to move its own body and use it to interact with the physical and social worlds.”
As we continue grinning and patting ourselves on the back about our advances in robot technology and march ourselves into our own demise, you can rest assured that the armies of creepy robot babies are just going to keep on smiling that same frightening smile that’ll remind us of ourselves when we were so excited about our accomplishments in robotics.
Until then just keep hitting the replay button and shuddering at Diego-san’s facial expressions.
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