Lovotics = Love + Robotics

The Human & robot may fall in Love one day


 

Talking heads are anthropomorphic representations of a software agent used to facilitate interaction between humans and the agent. They can be thought of as virtual humans capable of carrying on conversations with humans by both understanding and producing facial expressions and speech. The issues to be dealt with for the creating such agents span two major areas of research namely animation and AI. With regard to the design of conversational agents, the problems faced are similar to the issues in the Natural Language Processing of AI. AIML, a state-of-the-art technology which attempts to overcome these issues has been used for the design of the brain of the agent developed in this project. It implements a pattern-matching algorithm and gives the user a great amount of functionality by offering tags which helps to make the agent seem context aware and intelligent. Efficient visual presentation of this agent is made possible by the use of superior facial deformation techniques and scripting languages which provide the user with a high level view of the animations that can be realized.

This is a real time facial expression recognition system. Initially, a front view image of the tester's neutral face is captured. This image is processed to detect the tester's face region, extract the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth features. The features location are then mapped to the real time video according to the video's resolution. Once the initialization is completed, the tester can express his emotion freely. The feature points can be predicted and tracked frame by frame using Kalman filter and Lucas-Kanade optical flow method. The displacement and velocity of each feature points are recorded at each frame. Once a expression is occur, the detection system will choose the maximum value among all the normal dot products and make a judgement displaced at the video. When one expression is over, the tester can expression his following emotions or re-initial the system if any tracker is lost.

In this project, we aim to develop a low cost, easy to use, and accurate EEG monitoring system. Furthermore, the DIY EEG module will be used in a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) to let people play computer games by simply thinking.
 

We are going to develop a dextrous robot hand that can mimic human hand action.
 

In this project, we focus on the lower body structure building and movement control. The robot will be static balanced which means even power is off; the whole structure would still keep standing up. In the later phase of the robot design, other modules will be added in, such as obstacle avoidance, voice command, automate charging, sound localization, etc.