Photo credit: CREATIVE MACHINES LAB/COLUMBIA ENGINEERING
AI researchers at Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab spent the past five years developing EVA, an animatronic robot that can observe a human and then mimic their facial expressions. Columbia engineering professor Hod Lipson said the idea for EVA came about a few years ago when his students began noticing that the robots in their lab were staring back at them through plastic, googly eyes.
Unlike other robots, EVA isn’t provided with a set of predefined expressions, but rather a camera captures images of a person’s face. Through a proprietary algorithm developed by the Creative Machines Lab, the robot can use the details of the face in the image to learn and mimic the facial expression in real time. To train EVA, they filmed hours of footage of EVA while its facial motors made random faces. This was purely to get it to learn and understand how to control its own face, all without human supervision.
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The greatest challenge in creating EVA was designing a system that was compact enough to fit inside the confines of a human skull while still being functional enough to produce a wide range of facial expressions,” said Zanwar Faraj, undergraduate student.
