How is Alex, the humanoid robot who will serve the public in a Russian municipal office

A new humanoid robot named Alex was presented in Russia at the international exhibition “Innoprom”. performed in Yekaterinburg. by robotics company Promobot. He will start working in the coming months in a multifunctional center for government and municipal services in the city.

According to the director of development of the company Oleg Kivokurstsez, the robot Alex will work alongside the human specialists of the service center: “The customer arrives in front of an empty window, where the robot performs the necessary manipulations with the documents. Alex is connected to other devices and services, so he can scan the documents and form a statement based on them. The visitor then signs the papers, the robot scans them and sends them to the information system. In addition, the machine can advise on services, print coupons and memos ”.

Alex’s creators say he’s also able to copy a person’s facial expressions, he can move his eyes, eyebrows, lips, communicate, and answer questions. The technology developed in the company, as well as its own patented design, allows the reproduction of more than 600 variants of human micromimic. The developers also used their own technology to create artificial skin.

Alex looks like a person, but even though he even has pores and wrinkles, his unnatural movements betray him anyway. In addition, he has a rather bulky round chamber on his chest.

Builders have made it their mission to break down the barrier of people’s mistrust of machines. As the chairman of the board of directors of the company Alexei Yuzhakov noted, six months ago, when the prototype completed a study on social attitudes towards robots.

“It turned out that a robotic person received the most positive feedback from customers. That is, the ideal formula for service delivery is the appearance of a person plus communication via a robot script. A man will never speak like a robot, but a robot that looks like a man is just around the corner”, Dijo Alexey Yuzhakov.

Besides, he himself became the prototype of the appearance of the mechanic worker of the municipal service center.

To achieve this, they took 11 silicone impressions, a process that took several hours. After that the “mask” was digitized into a 3D model and there they “drew” facial expressions for it.

But robot faces are always wider, because silicone is thicker than human skin and they look more mature, because there is no muscle tone, so Alex is not 100% the same as Alexey.

However, this robot is another step in the normalization of human-machine interactions and that is why its creators are very enthusiastic.

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