UT Austin’s HCR Lab just got this robot head, and its primary goal is to “elicit a sense of trust and sociability to an otherwise pure mechatronic device.” This is a moderately refreshing (and on the whole, quite advisable) approach to creating a robot… It’s very easy to focus on functionality without worrying about whether or not people are going to actually want to interact with your robot. Obviously, a lot of thought was put into Dreamer, because it’s securely in that sweet spot of humanish without trying too hard.
One of the things that I think makes this robot appear so natural is that fact that it has fast eyes that lead its head around, just like an animal or human. There’s only a minimal amount of that sluggish, mechanical servo response, and the video even mentions that the eyes are capable of moving even faster, up to “human speed.” Plus, as we’ve mentioned before, having eyelids is a really big deal.
