Every Prototype to Make a Humanoid Robot

[Narrator] Meet Amica.

It's clearly robotic and also, well, very humanlike.

The uncanny valley, when something artificial

triggers a feeling which can go from super cute

to super creepy, happens an instant.

But there are actually two uncanny valleys:

one static and one for motion.

And this team of designers and roboticists

think they figured out how to avoid the fall.

We have this really strong notion of biological motion.

So you very, very rarely mistake a machine

for a living thing

and we wanted to play with that idea.

So what is it about the way that a machine moves

that will make you believe in it as if it's alive.

Wired talked with Will Jackson,

founder and CEO of Engineered Arts,

to understand how they design, prototype, and test

their humanoid robots.

[bright electronic music]

Cracking the code of dynamic movement

has been a continuous journey of prototypes and designs

for Engineered Arts.

Amica is their latest.

Instead of being sort of photorealistic, we are

more concerned about what is the essence of being human.

And it's not just visual, it's this dynamic data,

it's this movement data.

If you come close, what, what should happen?

So we have a change in expression.

So the focus of the eyes comes in tighter.

I think we went through 10 different attempts

of getting a smile and it was just

trying to get the the crease in the skin

when the robot smiles, that was really difficult

and those creases in the brow as well.

So we ended up having to add various fibers

and parts that would tension the skin inside.

Part of what the programmers here are doing

is they're studying people and looking at

how people behave and how can we can mimic

these kind of behaviors.

Why do we do that?

It's a communication tool.

So if the robot behaves in the way you expect

and it makes expressions that you understand,

you can do a lot of powerful communication with that.

If, you know, you go to the cinema

and you don't look at the screen and say, oh, look,

some red pixels and some blue pixels,

you immerse into it

and you become part of that story.

What we are doing is taking that kind of

willing suspension of disbelief

and putting it into the physical world.

[Narrator] Amica is a communication robot

built to entertain and educate.

Engineered Arts focuses on designing the gestures, look,

and movement of the robotic systems.

They leave the AI and what's being said

to the universities and companies that buy them.

Each unit takes about 12 to 16 weeks to make

and costs between 120 and $500,000.

So how do they do it?

The first thing you learn is that you're never

going to match human, so the first thing you learn

is how to deal with disappointment.

So we were trying to mimic

the way that human vertebrae worked

and then these red cords here are like the muscles.

There were six motors on this as well.

So enormously big and bulky.

Problem is that we have

these incredibly effective actuators, human muscle is,

has this huge power density

and very very fine force control.

This one in front of me is a version two.

So on paper, this looked kind of cool

and I, I drew it all out and I came back into work

and I sought with a mechanical design team and said

hey guys, can you turn this into reality?

And it just didn't barely move at all.

And then we realized there was so much friction

in all of this complexity,

in all of this kind of cable driving here

that just all the power of the motors

was lost in this drive.

So I spent maybe three or four months just working on this,

and then you just, at the end of it, it's just like,

mwah, doesn't work at all, start again.

I think we actually went through seven different versions

by the time we got to this one,

we dropped the idea of having seven vertebrae

'cause we realized you couldn't actually see it.

[Narrator] But human movement isn't just affected

by how our bones, joints, and muscles move together,

but also by the movement of our skin

You have 45, I think it is, different facial action units

that you can do.

So it's everything from a little tiny muscle pool in here

to you're inner brows, middle brows, outer brows,

mouth corners.

How do they transition from into a smile

and then back into a neutral expression?

So we did a lot of work actually studying human faces.

So these faces are made of silicone.

It tears really easily

so we end up having to put all kinds of fibers and fabric

and things inside that gave it some more strength

so it's a kind of composite material.

The head is actually used up with the motors

for driving the face

and then we try to make the skin as thin as we can

so it goes down to about one millimeter thick.

[Narrator] Their models are all made in house,

allowing ideas to go quickly from design to production.

They categorize and record every part they make.

If something doesn't work now, it may work later.

Amica is built on the years of learning and design

from earlier models.

So Robothespian was our first kind of robot,

that was a hybrid pneumatic electric robot,

which is quite an unusual design.

We were really interested,

how can we make a compliant robot?

How can we make a robot that's safe around people?

We did that with the early ones by using pneumatics.

So air is compressible, whereas

highly geared motors, you can't really back drive them.

You there's no transparency there.

You'll notice some of the motion is quite jerky.

It's a little bit clunky.

There is actually a very small compressor inside Amica

which is used for the arm balance mechanism.

So the air is used more like a spring within the system.

This is definitely something we've discovered with

with Robothespian, you know, 15 year old robot

that using this hybrid pneumatic electric approach

could be really efficient.

So this is Alfred, he's currently dressed up as a surgeon.

He's a Mesmer type robot,

which means he's got natural skin,

actually touching his face, there's actually stubble here.

Every little piece of hair on his face is inserted manually.

Even his wobbly little wee legs, oh,

he's gonna punch me.

It's a very, very different aesthetic to Amica,

so Amica, we wanted to make robot as robot,

no pretense that it's human and we were more concerned

about the movement.

With the Mesmer type robots, they need to

have a more human look.

So we've got this soft skin

and you see all these wrinkles on the hands

[Narrator] Amica debuted in December 2021.

The team is still fine-tuning

its design and functionality

with plans to perfect its hands dexterity.

So all these subtle things come and and kind of mean

the thing doesn't work,

so what we gained here was just knowledge,

and the knowledge is way more important

than whether it worked or not.

[bright string music]