Researchers at the University of California in San Diego developed the robot infant - named Diego San - to assess a hypothesis that babies can trick their mothers into smiling on command.
This baby-faced robot may look slightly creepy but it will most likely make you smile. Designed to imitate the facial expressions of an infant when it interacts with its caregiver, it has also helped verify that young babies don't smile randomly.
The group studied interaction between 13 mother-child pairs and analyzed their reactions in four dissimilar categories: how often just the kid smiled, how often just the mother smiled, how often both smiled and how often neither smiled.
The preliminary study found that mothers most often tried to, but their babies most often smiled only as a means of maximizing the time both they and their kids were smiling.Getting their mothers to do the same, the report revealed. That means the babies mostly wanted to be smiled at, while the moms were primarily motivated to make both smile.
The team then took the data and programmed the robot baby to smile just like babies do and studied 32 test subjects to gauge their reactions. In fact, the study concluded that infants exhibited sophisticated timing behaviors to accomplish their goals", means that kids use their cunning to trick their parents into doing what they want.
Although the experiment doesn't give any insight into whether young babies, or caregivers, are conscious of what they are doing, it suggests that their smiling patterns have a social goal. The results shed light on early human development and could help identify abnormal interactions in infants.
This isn't the first robo-baby. One robot infant was capable to learn to talk by listening to a human, while robot babies are being used to educate soon-to-be parents how to breastfeed.
