Rise of the Machines: PKD As a Replicant!

[Tuckerfan]

I wonder what it dreams of? (http://hansonrobotics.com/project_pkd.php)The robot will portray Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behavior through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech recognition software, advanced natural language processing, and speech synthesis in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics' highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system.The article's a year old, and they've apparently got the thing up and running as I heard a radio interview with it the other day.

[Digital Stimulus]

I wonder what it dreams of? (http://hansonrobotics.com/project_pkd.php)The article's a year old, and they've apparently got the thing up and running as I heard a radio interview with it the other day.
I was at the table next to it at last year's AAAI robot competition. Neat gimmick, using PKD. So, here's the thing -- it's pretty impressive as an animatronic entity. But very little A.I. involved. I'm pretty sure it was using the Ainebot chatbot software for conversation, as it used some of the exact stock responses as our robot did. Other responses were hard-code scripted. They had their patter nailed -- it seems as though no one even noticed that they had to reboot the computer (or perhaps just the face-tracking and chat software) every 5-10 minutes. And, if you watched it long enough, you could see that there was very little coordination among the motors controlling the expression.

However, since the skin material is Hanson's thing (he was getting his PhD from UT Austin for the work), the above is sorta nit-picking. The skin itself was pretty amazing, and the number of motors controlling it were enough to give it some real expressive looks. I'm curious as to how much progress the Hanson team has made in the past year...

[Tuckerfan]

I dunno. I wish I could find it on the web, but I've searched and searched, and haven't been able to turn anything up. It would have either been a BBC or NPR/PRI program, but nothing shows up on their sites.:mad:

[Digital Stimulus]

I assume you've visited Hanson Robotics (http://www.hansonrobotics.com/)?

[Tuckerfan]

Yup. That's where the link in the OP comes from.