Ameca can speak a variety of languages—including French, Chinese, and dozens more—write a poem in an instant, or draw a cat at your request. You can get a tight grin on her rubbery blue face if you ask for a smile.
Ameca is a humanoid robot that can interact with people and respond to queries and commands thanks to generative artificial intelligence. This week’s International Conference on Robotics and Automation, or ICRA, in London gave attendees a view into the future with the help of hundreds of robots on display.
The competition features student teams competing in a variety of challenges, such as robot cooking and autonomous driving competitions, academics presenting their research, and companies showcasing their products.
It happens at the same time as top scientists and figures from the IT sector, such as Microsoft and Google executives, issued a dire warning on Tuesday about the dangers that artificial intelligence poses to humanity, stating that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.”
Robotic dog packs mobbed the exhibition space. Visitors controlled the robotic arms of the wheeled sentries using joysticks and virtual reality headsets. University of Bonn students displayed their award-winning creation, an avatar system that enables users to manage robotic hands to move chess pieces, turn switches, or operate a drill while wearing VR glasses.
According to Ph.D. student Max Schwarz, one of the main difficulties was creating a system that someone who wasn’t on the team could use right away.
“It means we have to build an intuitive system that people can learn in a very short amount of time, like half an hour,” he said.
According to Kaspar Althoefer, general chair of the conference’s 2023 edition, new artificial intelligence systems are among the topics of conversation at this year’s event.
A nice illustration of how AI has advanced significantly is ChatGPT. Additionally, there is obviously a lot of interest in fusing this with robotics, according to Althoefer. “For instance, there wouldn’t need to be any programming if ChatGPT and a robotic device were used together,” the author explains.
Robots from Engineered Arts, the British company that developed Ameca, are made for duties that require interacting with people, such as assisting guests at theme parks, according to Will Jackson, director of the company.
“Humanoid robots are all about communication with people: So it’s about facial expression, it’s about gestures – so that conversation, storytelling, and entertainment, those are the things that we’re interested in,” he stated.
Ameca is more recent and has thus far primarily visited museums and academic institutions. It generates drawings with the AI picture generator Stable Diffusion and generates answers with OpenAI’s GPT-3. Ameca took a few seconds to come up with a few lyrics when asked to write a poem:
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