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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Babybot

Engineers at UC San Diego's Machine Perception Laboratory have created this robot to simulate the motor skills and development of a human one-year-old. It can hold a bottle and stand up in a chair. Oh, and it also has a humorously large head. Well, it's either humorous or nightmare-inducing, depending on your previous history with robot babies. I lean toward the former, though it should be noted that I've never been murdered by an infant automaton. So, why make the thing's head that big? Because its face had to be large enough to house the twenty moving parts that it uses to create expressions. How would we know when robot babies finally learn to hate if we can't see their grimaces? We wouldn't. That's how. More details here.