From the house of machine learning research at Apple comes yet another robotic innovation
8th February 2025, Saturday
ELEGNT: Not a normal robot with arms but a lamp-like robot that will interact with the user through expressive movements and gestures. Rather than doing the thing that normal robots do, which is functional, this robot is built on the idea of making the interaction more intuitive and fun through subtle gestures of prompting attention and feelings.
Robotics with a more animated beat
“ELEGNT: Expressive and Functional Movement Design for Non-anthropomorphic Robots,” has been authored by Apple researchers Yuhan Hu, Peide Huang, Mouli Sivapurapu, and Jian Zhang. This research paper serves as the backdrop to an ELEGNT that effectively works as an efficient movement-an-expressive motion amalgam.
In addition, nudging a glass of water, illuminating an object, providing music, or even projecting an image, ELEGNT does all this while adding on petty yet deliberate movements to give personality to whatever actions it does-reminiscent of the famous lamp animation by pixar.
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User Participation and Motion of AI
Apple has brought a video to show the difference between ELEGNT and a typical robotic lamp that is programmed with lesser movement. ELEGNT, at the demonstration, seems to nod at users, dances while playing music, and slouches into a position to show engagement.
A user study comparing expression-driven movements versus function-driven movements found that animated and engaging gestures greatly contributed to the user experience with and perception of a robot, particularly for social interactions, according to the Mac Machine Learning Research website.
A New Direction in Robotics?
Apple’s work on ELEGNT suggests that they may be developing robotics that adopt a more human-friendly, emotionally aware interface. While not speaking of any particular product, at least publicly, these research studies are so much evidence of the company’s progress toward more naturalistic, expressive machines as opposed to pure automations.
With big-name tech companies investing heavily into AI-powered robotics, Apple’s ELEGNT may just be that next step towards making machines feel easy to use and more responsive in everyday interaction.
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