As I have mentioned before, the internet is a weird and wonderful place. And Makerbot’s (Stratasys’?) Thingiverse is certainly building a reputation for housing some weird and wonderful things!
Robot builder and Thingiverse contributor RobodysseyBrian, has uploaded models for a device that replicates the expressions of a human face. The ESRA Talking Robot can also then link all the expressions together to form the appropriate facial expressions for words!
The demo version of the ESRA Talking Robot has been printed on a Solidoodle 3D printer and is powered by 3 Hitec servo motors. And as for the mouth – can you guess what cutting edge technique has been used? No, you’re wrong, it’s a hair scrunchie and it works bizarrely well!
As strange as this all seems, you don’t have to search Google very deeply to find many people and organisations creating 3D printed faces to use in education, medicine and research.
Emotive machines are probably not that far away and devices like this whist being fun toys, will also help us build better machines and improve our relationships with the inexorable wave of technology we face now and will face in the future.
So, no time to waste, if you want to make the ‘rise of the machines’ a pleasant experience rather than having to run away from large robots with Austrian accents (thinly veiled Terminator reference), download the files and build your own!
Source: Thingiverse Robodyssey
