Engineers in China have created a highly realistic female robot specially designed to interact with humans in a submissive manner.
The robot companion, nicknamed "Jiajia", was conceptualized and developed by a team of researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).
Technologically, Jiajia doesn't introduce any new breakthroughs when it comes to robotics. The developers instead focused on making the robot act submissively to her owner. She's even programmed to talk to humans using words that are sexist in tone.
During Jiajia's presentation to the local Chinese media on Friday, she introduced her male creators as her "lords". She also shied away when journalists tried to take pictures of her, stating that it would make her look fat if they pointed their cameras too close to her face.
Chen Xiaoping, director of the USTC that created Jiajia, explained that it took them three years of research and development in order to make her act very realistically, from the movement of her lips and body to showing micro-expressions on her face.
He said that compared to other interactive robots previously developed, Jiajia is capable of rolling her eyeballs naturally and move her lips in tune with her speech. She was also designed to have a body that highly resembles that of humans.
Chen added that so far, Jiajia is still not able to show emotions such as laughing or crying, but they are already working on giving these features to her.
"We hope to develop the robot so it has deep learning abilities," Chen said. "We will add facial expression recognition and make it interact more deeply with people."
The researchers hope that Jiajia would turn out to be a "robot goddess". They said that she is priceless and that they currently have no plans to make more ultrarealistic robots like her.
