AI: Robots with human skins

File this under things that keep me up at night. Robots will finally have human-like skin and will soon be able to mimic real facial expressions. This is a continuing development that I will keep researching and sharing data.

The researchers at the University of Tokyo and Harvard have been exploring the question — and they’ve come up with some pretty unsettling results.
“In this study, we managed to replicate human appearance to some extent by creating a face with the same surface material and structure as humans,” Professor Shoji Takeuchi, the team leader, said in a news release. In the process, he added, “We identified new challenges, such as the necessity for surface wrinkles and a thicker epidermis to achieve a more humanlike appearance.”

A new method of binding living skin tissue to a robotic skeleton will allow more humanlike expressions and better range of motion, according to researchers from the University of Tokyo.

Takeuchi et al. CC-BY-ND