The heads of realistic robots are most of the time created so as to see what it would be like if robots were capable of displaying facial expressions. The Mertz active vision head robot is not an exception.

Then you may ask yourself .”Why would this robot head be designed to look like a freaky baby head rather than a handsomer face?”.

As a matter of fact, the aim of this robot isn’t to test the response of humans to it, but the reaction of the robot to humans. You may learn more on this MIT experiment after the jump.

According to the source available to me, Mertz is “made to recognize and react to expressions and faces, with the purpose to research socially situated learning which is similar to an infant’s learning process”.

Thus we may say that it is a robot capable to “learn” just like my baby son learns to recognize facial features, and learns to speak by parroting those around him.

So how many emotional expression can the robot reproduce? I have heard that humans have thousands of forms of expression on their face, and I suppose that Mertz is capable of 13 degrees of articulation in its neck alone. None of us has the slightest idea what its mouth and eyes are capable of.

This robot was created by Jeff Weber and Lijin Aryananda at the MIT Media Lab. I hope this experiment will work, and if it succeeds, it will prove that machines can learn. However,I am not sure that I’m ready for that one.

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