Female Android Robot singing, dancing with great facial expressions and on stage


Female Android Robot singing and dancing

The HRP-4C is a humanoid robot created by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, a Japanese research facility, and publicly demonstrated on March 16, 2009. It is 158 cm (5 feet, 2 inches) tall and weighs 43 kg (95 pounds) including battery. Its shape and joints are based on the 1997–1998 Japanese body dimension database (though many have noted that the hands seem oversized). It is capable of recognizing ambient sounds and, by using the vocal synthesizer Vocaloid, can sing. Recent upgrades have allowed HRP-4C to mimic human facial and head movements as well as execute dance steps, resulting in the most human-like performance yet at Tokyo’s Digital Content Expo in 2010.

Watch the video of the female HRP-4C dancing with the real human female dancers:

Japanese female android is singing and dancing along with human performers. This video is surprisingly realistic. The innovation is a new software to program the movements of the robot. You basically click on the legs, arms, head, or torso and drag them to the position you want. You create a sequence of key poses and the software generates the trajectories and low-level control to make the robot move.

So by editing a relatively small number of key poses you can compose complex whole-body motion trajectories. See a screen shot of the software interface below, with a 6.7-second sequence that uses only eight key poses. The software verifies that the robot can indeed perform the transitions from one pose to the next. The software also monitors the robot’s stability. When it generates a trajectory between two key poses, it checks that the waist trajectory won’t create instabilities and that foot trajectories will result in enough contact with the floor. Here’s a video showing how the software works:

Kawada Industries makes HRP4. HRP-4 and HRP-4C are not the same robots. HRP-4C has 8 actuators in its head and it can make facial expressions. HRP-4 has no such kind of actuators. HRP-4 is made by Kawada. HRP-4C is special. It’s a collaboration. AIST designed the robot, but has no factory to make robot hardware, so it collaborated with Kawada and Kokoro. Kawada makes the body and Kokoro the head. There is a Geminoid created by Professor [Hiroshi] Ishiguro of Osaka University. He’s made several androids. His androids are made by Kokoro. So we also asked them to develop our robot head for HRP-4C. They have very good know-how to make humanlike skin. That’s an important factor.
For the model HRP-4, there is a recent video of HRP4:

Geminoid F was unveiled by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro early this year. The robot is a copy of a woman in her 20s with long dark hair.

When first demonstrated, the robot could laugh, smile, and exhibit other facial expressions. Now it’s even more impressive in the way it naturally changes its facial expressions.

The “Android-Human Theater” project is a collaboration between Ishiguro and Japanese director Oriza Hirata, who writes and directs.

According to Ishiguro, the play explores the question, “What do life and death mean to humans and robots?,” and it will “alter the audience’s images of robots and humans, and present a compelling fusion of theater arts and science.”

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