David Hanson is a globally reknowned robotics designer and researcher, having won multiple awards for his work in robotics and AI. Hanson is widely regarded as the creator of the world's most realistic humanoid robots, in close competition with the work of Hiroshi Ishiguro of the ATR in Japan. A key distinction of Hanson's robots, however, is the lightweight, low-power operation of Hanson robots, properties that spring from Hanson's patented Frubber material--a spongelike 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. Ishiguro's robots, in contrast, consume several kilowatts of power at 110v and require a large air compressor and a wall-plug, dramatically preventing mobile operations.

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. There Hanson and the Hubo team attached Einstein to a specially-decorated Hubo body, which was then demonstrated as "Albert Hubo" to world leaders at the APEC political summit in Busan, Korea on November 17, 2005. The robot is famous for subsequent photographs taken, shaking hands with world leaders including President Bush, and for appearing on the cover of WIRED magazine in January of 2006.

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--a "Kitty Hawk" moment in the history of android science.

In addition to hardware innovations, Hanson and company (Hanson Robotics Inc), have developed increasingly intelligent conversational personnas, integrating many forms of artificial intelligence (AI). Hanson's robots use speech recognition software (Multimodal, Fluent, Sphinx, and Nuance Dragon) to understand speech, Hanson's own AI systems for reponsive animations and 3D spatial reasoning and sensory fusion. Hanson, Jarod Roland, Matt Dekrey, and Benji Adams have integrated tools for authoring new personalities, and deep natural language processing (aka personalityforge.com) to produce intelligent conversation. Responses are spoken using realistic TTS synthetic voices from Acapela, synchronized with lip motions using MS SAPI 5. Cameras in the robot's eyes feed advanced computer vision algorithms (Intel Open CV) to see human faces and track them to make eye contact. Meanwhile faces are learned and recognized using Cognitec FaceVacs. In 2003, Hanson demostrated K-Bot, with Nevenvision's facial-feature tracking vision mirror, at the AAAS annual meeting. At the 2005 Nextfest, Hanson showed the intelligent android portrait of Philip K Dick (PKD-A), incorporating thousands of pages of the writings of PKD, including journals and letters, into an LSA corpus, constructed by Andrew Olney of the University of Memphis. The AI systems of Hanson's robots continue to evolve, but they consitently serve to create a fictional personna that is carefully constructed to facilitate naturalistic interaction and the illusion of greater intelligence than AI can deliver at this time in history. This artistry of AI may allow new forms of entertainment and simulation

At the 2006 WIRED Nextfest, KAIST brought the Albert Hubo, but demonstrated 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. The 2006 Nextfest was also the site of the world premier of Jules, Hanson's latest robot and the most intelligent 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 andorid (androgynoid) Jules, also now resides at UWE, for use in cognitive science research and AI development. Jules was commisioned by the UWE with a statistically perfect androgynous face. The term humanoid refers to any being whose body structure resembles that of a human. ...

As a University of Texas at Dallas doctoral candidate frin 2992 to the present, Hanson has developed 13 robotic artworks, including the sculpting and interactive narrative design of the works. In 2003, Hanson spun off a commercial venture, first called Human Emulation Robotics (HER), and later changed to Hanson Robotics Inc [1], in order to deliver the robots into useful applications like education and scientific research. Since then, Hanson has 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, and SPIE, among other peer-reviewed periodicals. The University of Texas at Dallas is a branch of the UT system, which, despite its name, is located in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, Texas. ...

Notably, Hanson has 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 the proceedings of IEEE Humanoids 2005 and Cog-Sci 2006, Hanson reported results of studies that found that the determining factor in acceptance or rejection, was not level of realism, but the quality of design. While the experiments confirmed that participants were more sensitive to higher levels of realism, the participants accepted the robots over a continuum of abstraction-to-realism. No Uncanny Valley was found.

Hanson has also carefully developed AI and robot animation, to develop androids into a new form of animation arts. Unlike the animation of the 20th century, however, Hanson's robotic animation uses artificial intelligence (AI) 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 future robotic art, like "the zoetrope was to 20th century cinema".

Hanson's robots have been extensively covered in the news media, including in the NY Times, Ubiquity, 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, and holds 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 as student at RISD, Hanson tinkered with robotics and AI, in independant 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.

After RISD, Hanson worked as a sculptor for Kern Sculpture Company in New Orleans, contracting for Universal Studios and Walt Disney Imagineering. Later, Hanson worked for Sun International, sculpting figures for the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, Bahamas. Most notably. In 1998, Hanson began work as a sculptor at Walt Disney Imagineering, in North HOllywood, CA. In 1999, Hanson transitioned into Disney's Technical Development, where he headed several robotic and materials projects.

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.

External links

• Hanson Robotics Home Page