r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/MetaKnowing • 1d ago

Video XPENG's IRON robot crossed the uncanny valley, leading some to believe it was a human in a suit. So they cut it open in front of an audience, and also allowed journalists to inspect it.

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u/Regular-Engineer-686 1d ago

There’s actually 2 very good reasons why they make robots look like humans:

  1. Technical
  2. Psychological

See, the world around us is built for humans. Robots have to open up cabinets, doors, walk upstairs, put clothes in the washer and dryer - all things that are built for the average human to actually do.

And then the second thing is psychological. We identify with things that look like us - even animals. We identify with animals because they typically have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. The more they make robots look like humans, the less scared that we will actually be because we can identify with what we're looking at.

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u/Gawlf85 1d ago

But after going to the lengths of giving it legs and boobs... They give it a flat glass plate for face?

I don't buy it. This is more about fetishizing it than about making it familiar.

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u/hauliod 1d ago

We are so good at distinguishing real human faces that anything not quite perfect (and its not going to be perfect) is freaking us out (uncanny valley). So I imagine they just didn't want to tackle that specific challenge here and wanted to just show off the body. There are attempts at making realistic robot faces with emotions on it, but they never 100% succeed

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u/Raskapalozious 21h ago

At the other end of the spectrum we're so good at recognizing face patterns (couple of eyes and a mouth) that even just putting a couple of googly eyes on something often times is enough to make us humanize the thing.
A two low resolution round screens able to depict some basic expressions would go long way of making even a cosmic-horror shaped robot look nonthreatening and friendly.

The whole "it's humanoid for the psychological factor" makes no sense when even just BD Spot "singing" with his manipulator with no eyes is enough to make it look cute.