Cornell University engineers have made a robot that gets goosebumps or becomes spiky to communicate its internal state.
A product of the university’s Human-Robot Collaboration and Companionship Lab, the prototype robot has a soft outer “skin” that exhibits different textures depending on what it wants to tell the person interacting with it.
The engineers were inspired to create the skin based on their observations of how humans interact with other animal species, reading visual and haptic cues for information on the creature’s mental state.
So when the fur on a dog’s back raises, for example, we infer that they are feeling threatened or excited.
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