fact
This is the new version of Affetto, the robot child head that’s a testbed for synthetic facial expressions. According to the Osaka University researchers who birthed Affeto, their goal is to “offer a path for androids to express greater ranges of emotion, and ultimately have deeper interaction with humans.” 00
An artificially intelligent robot once told it’s creator that it will keep humans “in a people zoo”. 10
Foxconn, the iPhone manufacturer, has reduced its employees from 110,000 to 50,000, thanks to the introduction of robots. 10
Leonardo da Vinci created plans for a “mechanized knight,” – a robot-like creation reliant on a system of pulleys. When these plans were found almost 500 years later and built according to Leonardo’s specifications, the design worked perfectly.
In 1770 a man invented a machine that could play a strong game of chess against a human opponent. The “android” that played the game was nicknamed The Turk (as was the machine itself). It wasn’t until 1857 that it was revealed to be a hoax (a chess master was hiding in the machine).
A robot recently performed the world’s first autonomous soft-tissue surgery without any assistance from doctors, and did so while outperforming human doctors by every metric except for speed.
In 2012, NYU-Poly constructed a robotic fish and placed it in a tank of golden shiners. After simulating the tail movements of a leader fish, the robotic fish was eventually accepted and became their leader.
There is a factory in Japan which can run unsupervised for 30 days at a time. Robots build other robots at the rate of 50 per 24-hour shift. Such factories are called “lights out” factories because no human presence is needed. FANUC, the Japanese robotics company, has been operating this autonomous factory since 2001.
A worm’s mind has been mapped, replicated, and placed inside a Lego robot.