‘Emotional’ robot uses goosebumps, spikes to express feelings

Although many robots have already been created that can express their emotions through face, but in a latest invention scientists have built a robot that can express feelings just like humans, such as having goosebumps.

Team from Cornell University decided to integrate various human gestures of demonstrating their feelings into robots. The prototype robot created can show various gestures for its various emotions on its outer surface.

The robot has a soft, adjustable skin to show physical signs to its feelings so that the person can actually feel its emotions. When happy, the robot develops goosebumps, when angry, it generates spikes, or just gives a timid response when it’s sad and needs a hug.

Video Courtesy: Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab

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As per Cornell Chronicle, the skin features individual sets of goosebumps and spike generators, each of which are connected by fluidic chambers. When it wants to express itself, a two-pump system applies pressure to the generators at the strength and frequency required for conveying them. The process is quiet and doesn’t kill the moment with loud pumping noises.

As per the assistant professor Guy Hoffman, the robot was inspired from animal world, based on the idea that robots shouldn’t be thought of in human terms. They were inspired by the non-verbal cues given by various animals such as raising fur on a dog or cat, waggling tails, or ruffling bird feathers.

“I’ve always felt that robots shouldn’t just be modeled after humans or be copies of humans. We have a lot of interesting relationships with other species. Robots could be thought of as one of those ‘other species’, not trying to copy what we do but interacting with us with their own language, tapping into our own instincts,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman, however, at this point does not have any particular application for the robot, he just wanted to prove that this can be done. “It’s really just giving us another way to think about how robots could be designed.”

In future, he wants to scale the technology to fit into a self-contained robot and make the technology more responsive to the robot’s immediate emotional changes.

“At the moment, most social robots express [their] internal state only by using facial expressions and gestures. We believe that the integration of a texture-changing skin, combining both haptic [feel] and visual modalities, can thus significantly enhance the expressive spectrum of robots for social interaction.”