China has unveiled the world’s first “emotional” robot, designed to have “human-like behaviour” and feel “happiness, sadness and anger”.
This incredible machine, named “Guanghua No. 1”, put on an impressive show, showing off a variety of different expressions.
The bot was unveiled in its entirety at the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Congress.
The robot, developed by Shanghai’s Fudan University, is about 165 centimeters tall and weighs about 62 kilograms.
The humanoid robot is “emotionally responsive, flexible and sophisticated,” reports Interesting Engineering.
It comes with 45 intelligent joints with a “hierarchical generative embodied brain model.”
This allows the robot to move its hands properly and walk upright.
It also has the ability to handle four emotions on the face screen: happy, angry, sad and joy.
The clever creators of this high-tech humanoid robot say they built it to meet the needs of China’s growing ageing population.
“Our market research shows that elderly care and health services are the most urgent areas for the application of humanoid robots,” said Gan Zhongxue, deputy dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Fudan University.
He added that their vision is to create a “health companion” that can provide personalized, empathetic care to seniors.
The main objective of developing this robot was to address the emotional needs of the elderly.
“Providing care to emotionless, mechanical beings is a very difficult thing to do,” Gunn explains. Failure Providing a family-like atmosphere. True compassion requires emotional intelligence.”
Guanghua 1 is the only humanoid robot developed by Fudan University, among 18 humanoid robots. robot It was on display at this year’s WAIC.
The gadget’s emotional intelligence is inspired by the brain’s motivation and dopamine reward mechanisms.
It also leverages multi-level, coordinated incentive algorithms that produce human-like perception and behavior.
The robot has been in development for the past two years and was designed by a team of experts in mechanical engineering, biology, engineering, computer science and big data.
They are already planning to release a trial version by the end of 2024 and are currently conducting large-scale testing in provinces such as Jiangsu and Zhejiang.
The team is also testing the robot to improve its accuracy and safety.
These tests include seeing if the robot can perform tasks such as getting an elderly person out of bed or taking them to the bathroom.