Philip K Dick - His worst fears realised!

An android-portrait of Philip K Dick

Philip K. Dick: Nexus 1?

In an unparalleled technical collaboration, a team of artists, writers, engineers, literary scholars, and freethinkers are creating a lifelike, android portrait of one of America's well-known science-fiction writers Philip K Dick. The robot will be featured at WIRED magazine's Next Fest, June 25-27, 2005.

The late Philip K. Dick created the fiction behind Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall. In addition, Dick wrote A Scanner Darkly, which will come out as a major feature film this fall. Hanson Robotics Inc (HRI), the FedEx Institute of Technology's Institute for Intelligent Systems (IIS) and the Automation and Robotics Research Institute (ARRI) at UTA are working with Paul Williams, a close friend and former literary executor of Dick, to create a robotic portrait that will be a powerful memorial to the author.

Philip K Dick's works addressed themes in which science, technology and robotics challenge and twist human identity. He would often portray robots that think they are human or mimic a given human identity. Celebrating and resurrecting Dick with such a robot reflects simultaneously upon the works of Dick and the advancement of robotic technology. This robot publicly represents a remarkable convergence of the world's best expressive robot hardware, natural language AI and machine vision that will appear in a wide range of applications such as advertising, entertainment, and education.

The robot will portray Dick in both form and intellect through an artificial-intelligence-driven personality. The hardware will manipulate Hanson's proprietary lifelike skin material to affect extremely realistic expressions with very low power. Cameras in the eyes will allow the robot to perceive people's identity and behaviour through advanced machine vision and biometric-identification software. The robot will track faces, perceive facial expressions, and recognize people from the crowd (family, friends, celebrities, etc).

The visual data will be fused with some of the best speech recognition software, advanced natural language processing, and speech synthesis in the world. All of this will run in sync with Hanson Robotics' highly expressive robot face to emulate a full human-conversational system.

IIS will create the artificial intelligence personality of the robot by mathematically deriving it from Dick's life and works in a manner very similar to that described by Dick himself in his book We Can Build You (published in 1964). ARRI will supply mechanical and manufacturability engineering support. Their eloquent CAD models will provide a solid foundation.

Hanson Robotics is rendering the mechanical and animation systems of the Dick robot. Hanson's distinguished humanlike face technology has been featured in Science, WIRED, the NY Times, CNN, and other prominent venues (see: www.human-robot.org and http://ndeaa.jpl.nasa.gov/nasa-nde/biomimetics/Biomimetic-robot-Hanson.mov). IIS brings its renowned expertise for AI and natural language systems as featured in WIRED, AI Magazine, as well as other well-known periodicals (see: www.fedex.memphis.edu andwww.iismemphis.org). ARRI's premier mechanical engineering expertise ensures the project encompasses cutting edge robotics (see: ARRI.uta.edu.)