The UTD Mercury

Arts and technology doctoral student David Hanson plans to sell his babies to the public for about $2,000 a piece.

Like other robots made by his company - Hanson Robotics, Inc. - each of these high-end humanoids will be able to make eye contact with people, recognize faces, call someone by name and voice stories about itself in English.

Hanson isn't the only one who thinks his work is valuable. Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently awarded Hanson Robotics a $1.5 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund to further develop his robotics technology.

Hanson founded Hanson Robotics, Inc., in late 2003 "to commercialize social robotic characters and constituent technologies," according to his company web site. Hanson serves as his company's president and director.

"Within a few years, our robots' performance will be as full of life and artistry as something from Pixar," Hanson said.

Hanson patented an artificial skin for his robots, which he calls "frubber," a contraction of the words "flesh" and "rubber."

While working with Imagineers - a division of Disney that designs animatronics for theme parks - Hanson said he saw room for improvement in the artificial flesh that was being used for their robots. He decided to create something better, using the bathroom of his California apartment as a laboratory.

He and his collaborator/girlfriend/robotic head model Kristen Nelson experimented with 970 combinations of materials until they discovered a combination with optimal levels of flexibility, elasticity and stability, according to the Hanson Robotics website. The result of this experimentation is frubber - flesh rubber - which allows expressions that are more dramatic, more human-like and require 1/10th of the energy to animate, Hanson said.

Hanson made his first robotic head in 1995 as part of his independent study project at the Rhode Island School of Design. The head was a sculpted remote-controlled self-portrait that moved around on wheels and talked with people. He wanted to create an "out-of-body experience" with the project.

Later, he befriended NASA scientist Yoseph Bar-Cohen, who asked him to contribute a chapter to his book on robotics and then later to construct a robotic head for Bar-Cohen to display at a NASA presentation on robotics.

Since then, his robots have received coverage from such national and international media outlets as the Wall Street Journal, CNN and Wired magazine, which put one of his robots on the cover.

"He's an unbelievable person in terms of talent, persistence and hard work," said Thomas Linehan, director of the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering. "He's principally an artist."

Hanson earned his undergraduate degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he made science fiction films and wrote screenplays. He said that experience paid off when he was designing the story and character for his latest robot, which is a toddler-sized character named Zeno.

Zeno, Hanson's first robot to be mass-marketed, is still in development. Hanson said he hopes to have it in stores by late next year.

"Human heads will roll (off the assembly line)," Hanson joked about the upcoming production.

He sculpts the heads himself, such as the Philip K. Dick head, the Einstein head and even a robotic version of his girlfriend.

Nelson fondly remembers the beginning of the couple's courtship, according to the Hanson Robotics web site. She said Hanson noticed her in a Dallas bar and asked, "Can I make you into a robot?"

"He's really, really interested in the interface humans have with computers," Linehan said. "It's a very broad bandwidth of information you're dealing with when looking at the human face."

Linehan describes Hanson as a very motivated, self-directed learner, who identified the problem he wanted to study and then tracked down the experts who could give him tools on how to solve it.

Hanson said his passion for robots comes from his love of science-fiction, especially the works of Philip K. Dick, whose novels and short stories have been adapted into such films as "Blade Runner," "Minority Report" and "Total Recall."

Dick often asked the question, "What does it mean to be human?" His books showed the folly of treating robots as less-than-human.

"I'm taking Dick's warnings seriously," Hanson said.

Hanson has made it easier to hear those warnings by loading all of Dick's novels and biographical information into the memory of the P.K. Dick robot. Like Hanson's other robots, P.K. Dick has cameras in its eyes that allow it to make eye contact and recognize faces. But unlike other robots, this one will have conversations about Dick's life and works.

His goal is to build compassionate machines with social intelligence. He plans to do this by giving them nuanced facial expressions and by reproducing them so they can interact in people's lives.

"Ten years ago, if you had described a robot doing all of those things at once, a lot of scientists would have laughed," Hanson said.

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