It was only a matter of time before our machines became not only a functional, but emotional part of our lives. As devices become more and more personalized, we are drawn toward them in a way that we are drawn toward the people in our lives. “It knows me,” this personalization seems to say. And as these devices become more personalized with recognition features, where do we draw the line between functional robotics and love? After all, don’t robotics exist to fill a gap in life or make it more efficient? And aren’t humans sometimes unpredictable and unreliable, unlike our machines?

The Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technology Laboratory (AIART) in Tawain has been developing a lovotics robot to further explore the human to robot relationship. Involved in this development is the understand of the physiology behind love, which of course is a complex combination of factors including hormones, affect and emotion. According to their website, the artificial intelligence in the lovotics lab mimics the different human systems involved in love and includes the development of an Artificial Endocrine System (physiology), Probabilistic Love Assembly (psychology), and the Affective State Transition (emotions).

The lab has worked on mimicking a myriad of human hormones, evaluating gestures and expressions. The psychological unit has looked into numerous parameters such as proximity, similarity, attachment, attraction, and reciprocal liking, among others. The robot not only enables these human components, but adjusts them based on input and feedback. Amazing, is love as mysterious as we like to think or a controllable environment of many components? This opens the window to questions of our future, will relationships as we know them change? See the video below.

And a video with more explanation: