Robot Teacher Saya-San
A professor named Hiroshi Kobayashi at Tokyo’s Science University has developed Saya-San, a robot teacher. Saya-San currently can take attendance and hand out assignments. One of her most suprising abilities is enabled by 18 motors located under her eerily life-like latex face which allow her to make various expressions which are linked to descriptive words like sad, angry and happy.
Japan is funding research into robots like Saya-San as a possible solution for the problem of labor shortages due to an aging population. Inventor Kobayashi is careful to warn that Saya-San has no intelligence and still couldn’t begin to replace a human instructor.
An earlier version of this robot named Saya was put to work as a receptionist in 2004. See her being put through her paces in this Video:
Friday, 11. March 2011 22:47
[...] We’re one step closer to realistic android robots that resemble living human beings. Henrik Scharfe, a Danish professor, recently worked with Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Institute (ATR) and Japanese entertainment company Kokoro on the creation of a lifelike android that is a copy of himself. This android is named DK and is third in a line of Geminoid robots that include HI-1 and F1. Japan is currently in the forefront of the development of lifelike robots. [...]