Repliee Q2 (human-like robot)

February 1, 2006 SMH

Students of Hiroshi Ishiguro will struggle to tell their teacher from his robotic doppelganger, writes Deborah Smith.


Travelling long distances to meetings and conferences will soon be a thing of the past for Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, the creator of the world's most human-like robot - a female named Repliee Q2. Ishiguro, of Osaka University, is close to finishing an even more advanced robot - a male, this time - that will be a physical replica of himself.

"I will not need to come here again," he told a conference in Sydney earlier this week. "I will send my android instead."

The busy Japanese scientist expects his $500,000 lookalike will prove most valuable for avoiding the regular trips to see his research students at the ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories in Kyoto, an hour's drive away from his Osaka office.

Its lifelike presence will keep his researchers on their toes during teleconferences, he hopes. "If they feel my authority with my android there, it will be good," he told the Herald.

Hollywood's robotic creations usually have hard, metallic shells. But people prefer human-like machines with soft skin, Ishiguro says. "They don't like to spend time with a robot-like robot."
He predicts that as lifelike androids become cheaper and more sophisticated, some of their first uses will be as companions for the elderly and as guides for people in railways stations or museums. Replacements for models draped over cars at motor shows is another possible early application, he says. "Then you don't need to hire beautiful women."

He thinks other busy people, apart from himself, will also be attracted to the idea of a stand-in android to do the travelling for them.

Ishiguro was covered from top to toe in a plaster cast and precise measurements of his skull were taken to ensure his new robot, which he expects to be completed within a few months, would resemble him as closely as possible.

The first robot he made in this way was a copy of his five-year-old daughter. It looked like her, but its unsophisticated facial and body movements gave it an unnatural presence, like a "moving corpse".

Young children are particularly sensitive to the appearance of the robots and his daughter was very nervous meeting her spooky double, says Ishiguro, who is attending the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces at the Powerhouse Museum and University of Technology, Sydney.

Repliee Q2, which has a soft silicone skin, was unveiled in June at the 2005 World Exposition in Japan and is a copy of a Japanese television presenter. The robot's bigger size meant much more hardware could be inserted, making sophisticated movement possible.

It has to remain seated, but with more than 30 degrees of freedom in its upper body and lots of internal sensors, it reacts to being touched in a much more human-like manner than the child robot. Powered by an air compressor, it gestures, blinks, shifts its eyes naturally and its face and lips move in time with its speech.

Ishiguro says one of the most important aspects of building a lifelike robot is to make it appear to breathe and have it shift position slightly. "When you are sitting you never stop moving," he says.

Repliee Q2 cannot fool anyone for long. But the team's research shows that even when people know it is a robot they unconsciously react to it as if it were human, for example, by averting their gaze when it asks a question, to signal they are thinking of the answer.

Ishiguro says matching lip movement to the speech is also critical to avoid a spooky-looking android. For this reason he thinks some of the first models off the production line will be English speakers.

Japanese requires a lot of lip movement, he says. "And it's very hard for the android."