Proposal
Dear Collegue,
One of recent hot research areas in robotics are "emotional robots" which communicate
their feelings by facial gestures.
The research on them is done in MIT, IBM Alameda, Stanford, CMU, USC and many research institutions.
The robots that they use are "mechanical" robots, from aluminum and plastic,
they look like robots, not humans.
It came to my mind that we can combine these technologies with robots that will have "soft",
human-like appearence, i.e. built from latex, rubber, wigs, etc.
I am collaborating with Tears of Joy Theatre, the largest and best known puppet theatre
in Northwest. They are known for several award-winning plays
and their many attempts to extend the language of art.
We built already three robotic heads with four or five degrees of freedom each.
Now we are going to cover them with latex "faces".
A design instructor who works for Vinton Studios and puppet theatres will teach
us how to build the latex faces from scratch.
You can make a latex face which will be a 1-to-1 replica of your own face.
Students from my class will build the internals (playwood robot head with servos,
speech synthesis and speaker) and will use your digitized voice
together with AI language processing software
to build an electronic "avatar" of your person.
So far, Doug Hall, Alan Mishchenko, Jady Bates, and Marek Perkowski
agreed to participate in this endeavor.
If you are interested, please notify me.
We are applying for grants,
and I will try that the your cost will be reduced to zero, or to cost of materials only.
The final plan is to have a permanent "robot theatre" with avatars
of all ECE professors - talking heads, that will
communicate with students about ECE research areas and classes that professors teach.
This way, we can become the first University department in the world with
robotic avatars of all faculty and staff.
Sincerely
Marek Perkowski
P.S. From the legal point of view, you have the exclusive right to your face,
so if you are interested to participate in this project, you should give the Intelligent Robotics Lab
the right to use your face for non-commercial applications.
Using our technology, you can build another copy of your avatar and use it for
commercial applications. Our work has few ideas that we believe are patentable.