Skin Deep – Evolving InMoov’s Facial Expressions With AI
Carl
In the summer of 2015, Make: Volume 45 featured the InMoov robot on the cover. Inside, an article by Geeta Dayal introduced Gael Langevin, a French sculptor and technologist, who developed this 3D-printed humanoid robot from scratch. He set it up as an open source project with instructions on how to print the robot on a home 3D printer and assemble it. Gael said: “People are learning to do it by themselves.” InMoov spread because Gael had shown how to build a humanoid robot, something a lot of people are interested in doing.
This year, I checked in with Gael to learn about the current state of the InMoov project. I had once met with him in the Paris loft that contained his workshop and the apartment he shared with his wife, Anneke. Since then, he told me they had left the city and moved to a small town in the Sancerre region of France. During Covid, he worked on designing the graphical interface of the software MyRobotLab, thereby enhancing the options for the InMoov interface. Now the heavy lift of programming all the robot’s behaviors is much lighter with AI.
“The InMoov project is steadily evolving, although I wish I had more time to work on it,” he told me by email. He still has to do projects for clients that pay the bills, but he is excited about what he’s learning to do with AI. “With the integration of ChatGPT and Ollama, an open-source tool from Meta that lets users run large language models (LLMs) locally on CPUs or GPUs, we can achieve amazing things. There are updates on LLM models just about every day, and I try to keep up to date.”
Gael described the new head for the InMoov robot as “the last physical evolution.” It has a silicone skin stretched across the head and it has “plenty of servomotors” that can create facial expressions. “The combination of ChatGPT with the skin is very interesting, because the robot is now able to compose its own face expressions that are appropriate for its responses. I have no control over which expression is chosen, and the outcome is sometimes surprising.”
Thomas Messerschmidt
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