David Hanson (American)
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David Hanson is a robotics designer and researcher, having won multiple awards[citation needed] for his work in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Hanson is widely regarded as the creator of the world's most realistic humanoid robots[citation needed] (also referred to as androids), in close competition with the work of Hiroshi Ishiguro of the ATR in Japan. A distinction of Hanson's robots, however, is the lightweight, low power operation of Hanson robots: properties that spring from patented "Frubber" material--a sponge like silicone, structured to mechanically simulate facial flesh. In tests, Hanson's fully expressive faces (simulating the actions of over 48 major facial muscles), consume only 10 watts at 6 volts [Hanson and White, 2004]. This allows the robots to be battery powered and mobile, able to attach to walking biped robots such as Asimo, Robosapien, or Hubo. The robots of Ishiguro, by contrast, consume several kilowatts of power at 110 volts and require a large air compressor and a continuous external power supply, preventing mobility[citation needed].
In 2005, the low power mobility of Hanson's robots was demonstrated within the world's first expressive walking humanoid, in collaboration with the KAIST Hubo group. In October 2005, Hanson developed the robotic bust of Einstein, delivered to the Hubo lab at KAIST in Daejeon, Korea in November 2005. There Hanson and the Hubo team attached the bust of Einstein to a specially-decorated Hubo body, which was dubbed "Albert Hubo". It was demonstrated to world leaders at the APEC political summit in Busan, Korea on November 17, 2005. The robot has been in photographed shaking hands with world leaders including President George W. Bush, and for appearing on the cover of WIRED magazine in January of 2006. Video of the Einstein android.
However, the Hubo Einstein is not actually the first walking expressive humanoid. At the June 2005 WIRED Nextfest in Chicago, Hanson attached his Eva robot to the walking Hubo robot body, an event that later inspired the two groups to develop the Albert Hubo. While the "Eva-Hubo" robot only took a few steps and made a few facial expressions, it nevertheless represents the historical first robotic emulation of a full human being[citation needed] -- a "Kitty Hawk" moment in the history of android science[citation needed].
In addition to hardware innovations, Hanson and company (Hanson Robotics Inc), are known for developing increasingly intelligent conversational personnas, integrating many forms of AI. Hanson's robots use speech recognition software, natural language processing, computer vision, and Hanson's own AI systems for responsive animations and 3D spatial reasoning and sensory fusion [Hanson et al, 2004, 2005, 2006]. Early instances of this work was shown first at the 2002 AAAI conference in Edmonton, Canada [Hanson, 2002] and at the AAAS annual meeting in Denver, Colorado [Hanson et al, 2003]. In 2005 Hanson and team received a AAAI award for the intelligent conversational portrait of Philip K Dick [AI Magazine, fall 2005]. First shown at the 2005 Nextfest, the intelligent android portrait of Philip K Dick (PKD-A), incorporated thousands of pages of the writings of PKD including journals and letters, into an LSA corpus and conversational system constructed by Andrew Olney of the University of Memphis. Additional conversational design for the PKD-android was provided by Steve Aydt and Hanson [Hanson et al, 2005].
The software for Hanson robots is designed to imitate the flow of a face-to face conversational interaction--a dynamic HRI calls the "humanlike computer interface" [WIRED 2005]. In a typical interaction, cameras in the robot's eyes feed advanced computer vision algorithms (including several from Intel Open CV) to see human faces and track them. This data is used by the motion control to servo the head to affect eye contact with a person. Meanwhile, faces are learned and recognized using biometric identification, typically Cognitec FaceVacs. This allows the robot to remember you, discuss previous interactions, and to learn new faces. If a face is recognized, the robot may vocalize a warm greeting. However, if the previous interactions were negative, the robot likely will be cold and unfriendly in response.
New AI features are regularly demonstrated in Hanson's robots. In the K-Bot robot shown at the 2003 AAAS annual meeting, the computer vision included Nevenvision's facial-feature tracking, which allowed K-bot to see and mimic facial expressions. In the Jules robot shown at 2006 WIRED Nextfest, the interpreted vision data was assembled into a 3D world model, and correlated with the natural language database.
The AI of Hanson's robots are partially fictional personna, designed to affect an illusion of greater intelligence than AI can deliver at this point in history. This fusion of true AI with artistry is considered promising form of character animation for entertainment, training simulation and education in the short term. By simulating the integrated conversational human, such robots enable novel design of general intelligence in machines, which may progress into true sentience over coming years.
Hanson's robots have appeared in numerous venues in recent years. At the 2006 WIRED Nextfest, KAIST and Hanson presented the Albert Hubo, but KAIST re-labelled the robot as Alex Hubo, to avoid confusion and copyright violation. However, as a work of fine art, the robotic Einstein portrait is protected under Fair Use, so the caution may be superfluous. The 2006 Nextfest was also the site of the world premier of Jules, Hanson's latest robot and the most intelligent one to date. Videos of Jules in action can be seen at Youtube.com, as can videos of Hubo Einstein and Hanson's other robots.
Hanson is also noted for creating the android portrait of Philip K Dick (Author of "Minority Report" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), and a robotic humanoid sculptures named K-Bot, Vera, and Eva (now at the University of the West of England (UWE), in Bristol). Hanson's latest robot, the androgynous android (or "androgynoid") Jules, also now resides at UWE, for use in cognitive science research and AI development. Jules was commissioned by the UWE with a statistically perfect androgynous face.
As a University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate from 2002 to the present, Hanson has developed 13 humanoid robots, plus dozens of robotic artworks, performing many aspects of design including the sculpting, moldmaking, systems design, and material science research. In 2003, Hanson spun off a commercial venture, first called Human Emulation Robotics (HER) but later (2005) changed to Hanson Robotics Inc (HRI) [1], in order to deliver the robots into useful applications like education and scientific research. Since then, Hanson has sold and delivered four robots to scientific research labs (JPL, UWE, and KAIST), and conducted numerous cognitive science, AI, and material science experiments using these robots. The results have been published with AAAI, IEEE, proceedings of Cognitive Science, AAAS, and SPIE, among other peer-reviewed periodicals.
Notably, Hanson has repeatedly challenged preconceptions regarding the so-called "Uncanny Valley", which contends that robots will be rejected if they are not either extremely cartoonish or perfectly realistic. In other words, the Uncanny valley hypothesis presumes there to be a region in between cartoons and realism that is unavoidably eerie. While no empirical evidence has ever shown "level-of-realism" to be causally related to "level-of-eerieness", the concept has become commonly accepted as principle in robot design. This fact inspired Hanson to attempt to debunk the myth of the Uncanny Valley with a series of robots and experiments conducted from 2004 to 2006. In the proceedings of AAAI 2005, [Hanson et al, 2005] of IEEE Humanoids 2005 [Hanson, 2005] and Cog-Sci 2006 [Hanson, 2006], Hanson reported the results of experiments with human participants, which found that the determining factor in appeal vs. eerieness was quality of design, not level of realism. While the experiments did confirm that participants were more perceptive and attuned to more realistic depictions, the participants found robots appealing, and not eerie, over a continuum of abstraction-to-realism, provided the robots were well-designed. With alternate designs, the participants found nearly-real robots eerie, yet also found certain real human images eerie, and also select perfectly abstract robots to be eerie as well. Thus, in Hanson's studies, no Uncanny Valley was found to exist.
Hanson has also carefully developed AI and robot animation, to prove androids as a new form of animation arts. Unlike the animation of the 20th century, however, Hanson's robotic animation uses artificial intelligence to see faces, recognize people visually, understand speech, and hold interactive conversations. This intelligent animation can be seen in a number of Hanson's robots, including Vera, Eva, the PKD android, and Jules. In a 2006 interview with AP, Hanson described these as "mere sketches" of robotic art, like "the zoetrope was to 20th century cinema". This implies that robotics as an artform is still in a state of flux and evolution, that may result in sentient artworks.
Hanson's robots have been extensively covered in the news media, including in the NY Times, Ubiquity, WIRED, Popular Mechanics, the Science Channel, Popular Science, the Discovery Channel, IEEE Spectrum, Science, the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and many other media venues.
While Hanson is published and respected in the scientific community, receiving several awards and one patent with several more pending, Hanson has been substantially educated as a designer and artist. In 1996, Hanson received a BFA in film/animation/video (FAV) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). While a student at RISD, Hanson tinkered with robotics and AI, in independent studies and classes at Brown University. Hanson received some notoriety during this time for the "Primordial Ooze Bath", a 70' x 40' pit of carageenan sludge, in which hundreds of Brown and RISD students expressively frolicked. The installation/event was broadcast repeatedly on CNN's Headline News in 1995, and received coverage in newspapers nationwide. Hanson's immersive environmental constructions included the early Disturbathon events of Dallas, TX. Hanson's peers took over the design and implementation of Disturbathon after 1995 (although Hanson would later meet his wife in the pumpkin mud pond of Distubathon 2004 (totally nude)). In his 1995 paper "Robotic Party Architecture", written for a CS class at Brown, Hanson describes the intention of such immersive events as "catalysts to foment meme evolution, aka creativity, in the minds of the participants".
After RISD, Hanson worked as a sculptor for Kern Sculpture Company in New Orleans contracting for Universal Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering. In 1997, Hanson contracted for Sun International, sculpting figures for the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas. In 1998, Hanson went to North Hollywood, CA to work as a sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering. In 1999, Hanson transitioned into Disney's Technical Development, where he headed several robotic and materials projects. In spring 2001, Hanson left Disney and constructed a two-man art show (with David Deaney), involving functioning hot-tubs and titled "Gymnosophore". Hanson began work on a Ph.D. at the UTD in the spring of 2002.
Hanson's art sculptures have garnered positive reviews in the L.A. Times, NY Times, Washington Post, and CNN (see: www.portfolio.com/davidhanson). Hanson has received awards in both art and engineering, including an AAAI 1st place prize, Cooper Hewwit Triennial award, National Science Foundation STTR award, co-receipt of NASA's Space Act Award, and nomination for a WTN World Technology Award. Hanson has spoken at numerous venues, including DARPA, MIT, Dartmouth, Brown, Google, Sandia Labs, AAAS, UCSD, IEEE and AAAI.
On February 12 2006 (Darwin's birthday), Hanson married Amanda Catherine Fisher in the dinosaur footprints on the shore Lake Grapevine, TX. Four days later, the cycle of evolution completed another loop, as Amanda gave birth to Hanson's child, Zeno.
[edit] References
Breazeal C. (2002). Designing Sociable Robot., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Fong, T., Nourbakhsh, I., Dautenhahn, K. (2003). A survey of socially interactive robots. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 42, 143-166.
Hanson, D, Olney, A, Zielke, M, Pereira, A. (2005). Upending the uncanny valley, in AAAI conference proceedings.
Hanson D. “Expanding the Design Domain of Humanoid Robots”, Proc. ICCS CogSci Conference, special session on Android Science, Vancouver, 2006.
Jun-Ho O, Hanson D, Han I. Y., Kim J. K., Kim, W. S., Park, I.W. “Design of Android type Humanoid Robot Albert HUBO”, Proc. IEEE/RJS IROS Robotics Conference, Beijing, 2006.
Hanson D. “Expanding the Aesthetics Possibilities for Humanlike Robots”, Proc. IEEE Humanoid Robotics Conference, special session on the Uncanny Valley; Tskuba, Japan, December 2005.
Hanson D., Olney A., Prilliman S., Mathews E., Zielke M., Hammons D., Fernandez R., Stephanou H., “Upending the Uncanny Valley”, Proc. AAAI’s National Conference, Pittsburgh, 2005.
Hanson D., White V. “Converging the Capabilities of ElectroActive Polymer Artificial Muscles and the Requirements of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 10TH Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2004.
Hanson D., Rus D., Canvin S., Scmeirer G., “Applications of Bio-inspired Robotics”, Ch.10 of Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots. Bar-Cohen, Y and Breazeal, C. (Ed.) SPIE Press, May 2003.
Hanson, D. "EAP Actuator Design for Biologically-inspired Face-Based Communication Robots". Proc. SPIE’s Electroactive Polymer Actuators and Devices Conf., 9th Smart Structures and Materials Symposium, San Diego, USA, 2003.
Hanson, D. “Bio-inspired Facisal Expression Interface for Emotive Robots”, Proc. AAAI National Conference in Edmonton, CA, 2002.
Mori, Masahiro (1970). Bukimi no tani (the uncanny valley). Energy, 7, 33–35. (In Japanese).
Norman, D. (1992). Turn signals are the facial expressions of automobiles. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus Publishing.
Rhodes, G., & Zebrowitz, L.A. (2002). Facial attractiveness: Evolutionary, cognitive, and social perspectives. Westport, Conn.: Ablex Publishing.
