Scientists from Bielefeld University have come up with a plastic-head robot called Flobi that can express a number of different emotions, and can have it’s appearance reassembled from male to female (or vice-versa) in a couple of minutes.
Since previous robotic heads have often been a bit too realistic for their own good, the design for Flobi is meant to give him/her a rather cartoonish exterior with exaggerated features, but still be recognizable as a human face. That is why they also used instead of latex, as the latter often looks too similar to real skin. Plastic also makes the above noted “sex operation” possible, where the user can manually remove Flobi’s face (revealing a mesh of wires underneath) and replace the parts with ones from the opposite gender. I’m sure that alone would be enough to freak out a few kids, but basically Flobi is supposed to look like a robot, not an android. The bot is built with 18 actuators, and has gyroscopes, high-resolution cameras and a microphone installed in its frame. It even has LEDs in its cheeks, which can turn red to simulate blushing.
Flobi can go through pretty much the entire range of human emotions, and does so with smooth transitions. Happy, sad, angry, surprised, embarrassed, confused – you name it. It achieves this by moving its highly expressive mouth, eyes (with eyelids) and eyebrows. Only the nose and ears are stationary, but you don’t need them much anyway. Tests will show how people perceive the robot and how they engage with it, which is information that will be used in further human-robot interaction developments.
The video outlines the basic concepts behind Flobi, and shows how to do one of those live sex changes.
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