Forcing a smile

A robot developed at the University of California, San Diego has learned to smile and make facial expressions through a process of self-guided learning.

The UC San Diego researchers used machine learning to empower their robot, which resembles Einstein, to learn to make the realistic facial expressions.

The faces of robots are increasingly realistic and the number of artificial muscles that controls them is rising. In light of this trend, UC San Diego researchers from the Machine Perception Laboratory are studying the face and head of their robotic Einstein to find ways to automate the process of teaching robots to make lifelike facial expressions.

This Einstein robot head has about 30 facial muscles, each moved by a tiny servo motor connected to the muscle by a string. Today, a highly trained person must manually set up these kinds of realistic robots so that the servos pull in the right combinations to make specific face expressions. To begin to automate this process, the UCSD researchers looked to both developmental psychology and machine learning.