Fred Gets His Head Examined.

• Position: THE BIG PICTURE - Engineered Arts' lifelike robot - Brief article

Meet Fred. (He's the one on the left.) Fred is a remarkably lifelike robot--one of many being built by Engineered Arts, a company in the United Kingdom. These days, all sorts of robots are part of everyday life (see graph), from self-operating vacuums to machines that prepare food. Most perform simple, repetitive tasks, but Fred is different. Called a Mesmer robot, he's amazingly complex and was designed to be as expressive as a real person. A human using a laptop can control his movements and make him talk, and his software ensures that he automatically maintains eye contact and makes natural facial expressions while he holds a conversation. While many of the company's robots are designed to entertain in tourist attractions-such as Madame Tussauds wax museums--some, like Fred, are also used to study how people react to different kinds of robots. Although many of us may find...