Lovotics – A New Robot Race that can Love!!

Humans have designed robots for making our tasks easier and simpler. These robots have been used in factories and even at homes as they can work tirelessly everyday and every time and that too without the need of money and food. Till now, no one has ever developed a robot that has the basic human emotions like crying, singing, laughing, dancing, affectionate, angriness, and so on. Of course, we have seen such robots in movies (Bicentennial Man). but in real life…not a chance!!

But, recently, some technicians at the National University of Singapore developed a  robot prototype called Lovotics that can express all these feelings. This robot has the ability to love and to be loved by humans. To develop such a machine, all they did was create a new robot with human behaviour by adding all humanly similar biological and emotional tools.

This may sound complicated, but all the complex hormones that are responsible for a human to get emotions and feelings are given to the robot. These artificial hormones include dopamine, serotonine, oxytocin and endorphin. Apart from these hormones, artificial intelligence process was also conducted to pass on brain signals using MRI scans so that the robots get a better idea on when to react for any kind of emotion.

The robot is taught well to interact with other humans and create emotions like laughter and many more at the right moment, according to the behaviour of the human it is interacting with. During this interaction, touching another analog to affectionate human interaction is very important. .

Just like any other robot, this one will also have the basic structural materials like a a processor with controller and wireless board, a flexible structure, batteries, touch sensors, microphones, an omni-directional base, servo motors, speakers and also LED’s.

A detailed explanation of the basic structure of Lovtics is given in the video below. The comparison between human-ti-human-behaviour and Lovotics-to-human behaviour is well descripted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48txxlf0OF4&feature=player_embedded

A fun interaction with Lovotics prototype is shown in the video below.