Las Vegas – Day three of CES 2022, the consumer electronics conference in Las Vegas, was the scene of another great tech prodigy. In this edition, Ameca was shown to the public for the first time, a humanoid robot equipped with highly developed artificial intelligence. The robot was developed by the British company Engineered Arts which states with great confidence that “Ameca is the most advanced humanoid robot in the world and represents the vanguard of human-robotic technology.”.
Driven by a great curiosity and the desire to make friends with Ameca, we went to pay her a visit to the English pavilion of CES 2022.
How does Ameca work?
Ameca was born as a real robotic platform designed for the interaction between man and robot. We are faced with a 1: 1 scale humanoid robot shown to the public “naked and raw” as the company did, which allows us to see the extraordinary network of mechanisms that (Ameca’s voice is female) allow it to move the upper body and head. At the time of the exposure her legs were still on the ground, you know that.
Ameca is in fact equipped with an extraordinary artificial intelligence with automatic learning based on the Tritium operating system, owner of Engineered Arts itself. It is a cutting-edge framework developed and perfected over 12 years that allows the operation of almost all the hardware components of which the robot is composed. The Ameca hardware is instead developed on the basis of robotics research that led to the birth of Mesmer technology, also owned by the company.
A chat with Ameca
Intrigued (issimi) by Ameca’s potential, we paid her a visit to have a chat man-to-machine. Know that to every single question we have, Ameca has answered with absolute precision and irony without getting lost in too much talk but without ever dodging a question. We asked her the simplest questions like the classics “what is your name?”, “What material are you made of?”, “Where are you?” and without the slightest hesitation, Ameca kindly answered everything.
Chatting with her we discovered that she has two powerful microphones in her ears to pick up sounds and is able to tell if we are talking to her or not. With each question, in fact, her mechanical gaze rests on whoever is speaking with her and her facial expression changes according to the question or the emotions it arouses. Ameca is in fact able to assume over 50 facial expressions and even if it is not able to feel emotions (we asked it!) It is able to understand and emulate them. No machine revolt… for now!
As the conversation progressed, the curiosity of passersby was drawn and they all started asking her even more and more complex questions. One of the attendants even offered her a drink but, unsurprisingly, Ameca declined the offer, confirming that, being a robot, she cannot drink. This is just one of dozens of complex and articulate questions to which he has always answered with confidence.
Ameca al CES 2022: il futuro
Shaking hands (conceptually) with Ameca was exciting and showed us the real potential of artificial intelligences and self-learning of the same. In just a few days Ameca has become the face of this edition of CES 2022, as well as a symbol of what technological development is able to give us. In part, the future is already among us, but the possibilities are so many that not even Ameca would know the correct answer.