Could this be the future of robotics ? Image Credit: YouTube / Engineered Arts

This super-realistic robotic head is capable of exhibiting a wide range of human emotions.The latest creation of British robotics company Engineered Arts, this unnerving facsimile of a human male achieves what is often referred to as ‘uncanny valley’ given that it looks eerily close to being a real human but it is possible to tell that something isn’t quite right about it.

Named Adrian and described as a ‘mesmer robot head’, this fascinating contraption is shown ‘waking up’ in a new video before pulling a range of facial expressions.

Its realism is helped along by incredibly lifelike skin which even features stubble and eyebrows.

According to the video’s caption, the robot has 22 custom servo actuators of which only 5 are in the mouth, hence why this particular test model is not capable of effective lip syncing.

“Each Mesmer robot is designed and built from 3D in-house scans of real people, allowing us to imitate human bone structure, skin texture and expressions convincingly,” the company wrote.

While it’s currently unclear how this technology is likely to be used in the real world, Adrian offers a tantalizing glimpse at a future in which we might live and work alongside highly realistic robots.

Let us hope, however, that such a future doesn’t turn into an episode of Black Mirror.

Without a doubt humans are on the path to cyborgism. Robots and humans will merge. I’m referring to hundreds of years in the future.

Scene from the movie “Alien.”

China starts televising clear weather on giant TV screens because Beijing is so clouded in smog.

Meet LEO: Tiny 2.5ft-tall drone-robot hybrid can use its two legs to navigate a slackline and skateboard, or switch on its thrusters to fly through the air

• LEONARDO (Legs Onboard Drone) is a 2.5ft-tall robot that has bipedal legs and thrusters
• It is able to walk on two legs with enough dexterity to slackline and skateboard, but can also fly through the air
• The team says the robot could one day be used to perform tasks currently very difficult for drones, robots or humans – including operating in hazardous and hard to reach environments

The idea of a robot that can navigate a slackline, skateboard and fly might sound like a concept of science fiction.

But such a bot is very much real, in the form of LEONARDO, or Legs Onboard Drone – a bipedal robot that has drone like thrusters for stability.

Known as LEO for short, it was built from parts of robots and drones found around the lab by engineers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

As well as improving stability when walking a tightrope, the propeller-based thrusters also allow the 2.5 foot tall bot to take to the air and fly. 

The team says that LEO could someday apply its conquest of land and air to robotic missions currently difficult for ground- or aerial-based robots and drones.

As well as slacklining and skateboarding, the team says the robot could one day be used to perform tasks currently very difficult for drones, robots or humans – including operating in hazardous and hard to reach environments. 

The team hasn’t said when LEO would be available for commercial use, or how much it would cost, as it is still at the research and development stage, but hope to work with a manufacturing partner in the future.

Hawaii Public Radio

APA robotic dog called Spot trots during a Honolulu Police Department demonstration to reporters Friday, May 14, 2021. (AP Photo/Jennifer Sinco Kelleher)

HONOLULU — If you’re homeless and looking for temporary shelter in Honolulu, expect a visit from a robotic police dog that will scan your eye to make sure you don’t have a fever.

That’s just one of the ways public safety agencies are starting to use Spot, the best-known of a new commercial category of robots that trot around with animal-like agility.

The handful of police officials experimenting with the four-legged machines say they’re just another tool, like existing drones and simple wheeled robots, to keep emergency responders out of harm’s way as they scout for dangers. But privacy watchdogs — the human kind — warn that police are secretly rushing to buy the robots without setting safeguards against aggressive, invasive or dehumanizing uses.

In Honolulu, the police department spent about $150,000 in federal pandemic relief money to buy their Spot from robotics firm Boston Dynamics for use at a government-run tent city near the airport.

“Because these people are houseless it’s considered OK to do that,” said Jongwook Kim, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaiʻi. “At some point it will come out again for some different use after the pandemic is over.”

Acting Lt. Joseph O’Neal of the Honolulu Police Department’s community outreach unit defended the robot’s use in a media demonstration earlier this year. He said it has protected officers, shelter staff and residents by scanning body temperatures between meal times at a shelter where homeless people could quarantine and get tested for COVID-19. The robot is also used to remotely interview individuals who have tested positive.

“We have not had a single person out there that said, ‘That’s scary, that’s worrisome,’” O’Neal said. “We don’t just walk around and arbitrarily scan people.”

Police use of such robots is still rare and largely untested — and hasn’t always gone over well with the public. Honolulu officials faced a backlash when a local news organization, Honolulu Civil Beat, revealed that the Spot purchase was made with federal relief money.

“One of the big challenges is accurately describing the state of the technology to people who have never had personal experience with it,” Michael Perry, vice president of business development at Boston Dynamics, said in an interview. “Most people are applying notions from science fiction to what the robot’s doing.”

For one of its customers, the Dutch national police, explaining the technology includes emphasizing that Spot is a very good robot — well-behaved and not so smart after all.

“It doesn’t think for itself,” Marjolein Smit, director of the special operations unit of the Dutch national police, said of the remote-controlled robot. “If you tell it to go to the left, it will go to the left. If you tell it to stop, it will stop.”

Earlier this year, her police division sent its Spot into the site of a deadly drug lab explosion near the Belgian border to check for dangerous chemicals and other hazards.

Perry said the company’s acceptable use guidelines prohibit Spot’s weaponization or anything that would violate privacy or civil rights laws, which he said puts the Honolulu police in the clear. It’s all part of a year-long effort by Boston Dynamics, which for decades relied on military research grants, to make its robots seem friendlier and thus more palatable to local governments and consumer-oriented businesses.

By contrast, a lesser-known rival, Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics, has no qualms about weaponization and supplies its dog-like robots to several branches of the U.S. military and its allies.

“It’s just plug and play, anything you want,” said Ghost Robotics CEO Jiren Parikh, who was critical of Boston Dynamics’ stated ethical principles as “selective morality” because of the company’s past involvement with the military.

Parikh added that his company doesn’t market its four-legged robots to police departments, though he said it would make sense for police to use them. “It’s basically a camera on a mobile device,” he said.

There are roughly 500 Spot robots now in the wild. Perry said they’re commonly used by utility companies to inspect high-voltage zones and other hazardous areas. Spot is also used to monitor construction sites, mines and factories, equipped with whatever sensor is needed for the job.

It’s still mostly controlled by humans, though all they have to do is tell it which direction to go and it can intuitively climb stairs or cross over rough terrain. It can also operate autonomously, but only if it’s already memorized an assigned route and there aren’t too many surprise obstacles.

“The first value that most people see in the robot is taking a person out of a hazardous situation,” Perry said.

Kim, of the ACLU in Hawaiʻi, acknowledged that there might be many legitimate uses for such machines, but said opening the door for police robots that interact with people is probably not a good idea. He pointed to how Dallas police in 2016 stuck explosives on a wheeled robot to kill a sniper, fueling an ongoing debate about “killer robots” in policing and warfighting.

“There’s the potential for these robots to increase the militarization of police departments and use it in ways that are unacceptable,” Kim said. “Maybe it’s not something we even want to let law enforcement have.”

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