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‘Emotional’ robot gets goose bumps when it is happy and spikes when angry

The prototype has been designed to let you feel how it’s ‘feeling’.
The prototype has been designed to let you feel how it’s ‘feeling’. The prototype has been designed to let you feel how it’s ‘feeling’.

A robot that can express “emotions” with tactile displays has been developed by scientists in the US.

The prototype, created by researchers at Cornell University, uses adjustable skin to change its outer surface – like for example, developing goose bumps if it is happy or spikes if it is angry.

The skin, which is made up of elastomer – a natural or synthetic polymer having elastic properties – contains special texture units with air cavities that inflate and deflate with the help of a two-pump system.

Guy Hoffman, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, said: “One of the challenges is that a lot of shape-changing technologies are quite loud, due to the pumps involved, and these make them also quite bulky.”

The robot is still a basic prototype, and the researchers say the next step in the challenge would be to scale the technology for robots of different shapes and sizes for use in social interaction and communication.

Writing in their open-access paper, the researchers said: “At the moment, most social robots express [their] internal state only by using facial expressions and gestures.

“We believe that the integration of a texture-changing skin, combining both haptic [feel] and visual modalities, can thus significantly enhance the expressive spectrum of robots for social interaction.”

Emotional robot.
Emotional robot. (Cornell University/YouTube screenshot)

However, Mr Hoffman adds that their work is based on the idea that robots shouldn’t be thought of in human terms.

He said: “I’ve always felt that robots shouldn’t just be modelled after humans or be copies of humans.

“We have a lot of interesting relationships with other species.

“Robots could be thought of as one of those ‘other species’, not trying to copy what we do but interacting with us with their own language, tapping into our own instincts.”