Engineered Arts: Social robots that are impossible to ignore

About Engineered Arts

Engineered Arts develops humanoid and semi-humanoid robots featuring natural human-like movement and advanced social behaviors. Their humanoid robots are used worldwide for social interaction, communication and entertainment at public exhibitions and attractions, as well as university research labs.

Building a social robot

The client wanted to make human-robot interaction as natural and believable as possible. It had to include the main elements of everyday human interaction – eye contact and facial expressions. To achieve that, the robots had to be able to detect and track human faces, which would allow them to establish eye contact. Furthermore, to keep people engaged, they also had to be able to recognize people’s emotions and react accordingly.

Since the client works with sophisticated technology, they wanted an equally advanced software to power up the interactive aspect of their robots. visage|SDK offered everything a social robot needed in one place – face tracking, emotion analysis and facial recognition:

•       visage|SDK is quick and lightweight so it can work flawlessly on all platforms and devices.
•       Human faces, including 99 facial landmarks, are accurately detected on images of various resolutions in real time.
•       Face tracking works locally on any device, even with no Internet connection.
•       FaceAnalysis estimates age, gender, and universal emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust and neutral).
•       FaceRecognition recognizes faces in real-time.
•       visage|SDK comes with a detailed development guide, lots of customization options and excellent technical support.

A robot that both stands out and blends in

Engineered Arts integrated visage|SDK into their social robots which are primarily used for human-robot interaction. This allowed the robots to detect faces, features, emotions, and gestures, opening up opportunities for improved, human-like interaction.

The robots can follow people around the room with their eyes, maintain eye contact, change their facial expressions to reflect their mood (or the mood of other people), and more – all in an effort to keep the interaction compelling and believable.

Engineered Arts’ robots are used for various purposes – from theater to marketing. The ability to bring any character to life with ultra-realistic looks and expressive range of movements and emotions is what makes their robots the stars of the show – every time.

“We use a number of technologies to bring our humanoid robots to life. The rich dataset available from visage|SDK has allowed us to build engaging experiences which automatically react to visitor movements and expressions.

Visage Technologies has always been there to aid us and have always been reactive to offer support when required. After giving them the gift of sight, our robots would certainly recommend Visage Technologies to the rest of robot-kind.”

Morgan Roe, Director of Operations, Engineered Arts