Copernicus, large as life

He has the face of Nicolas Copernicus. He is tall (190 cm) and weighs 100 kg, although he doesn't look like it. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, he can talk about anything and deal with the most difficult questions. The most advanced humanoid robot in the world has appeared in Copernicus Science Centre! Our Copernicus communicates with the world with the help of the most popular language model – GPT3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). Chat GPT (available online since November 2022) is based on 20 billion parameters. And that is only 20 billion, since the full GPT3 model, which our robot is using, has 175 billion of them! Thanks to this, it can generate literally any kind of content by learning from the Internet and the training data. An “eye to eye” conversation with an AI is exceptionally emotional. And when the AI takes the shape of one of the most famous scientists, the impressions are impossible to describe! The robotic Copernicus looks the way we remember him from the famous Matejko's painting or old 1000 zł banknotes. The combination of history and new technologies creates a unique mixture which fascinates, surprises, and for some people, causes the uncanny valley effect (we are “afraid” of robots that resemble people too much).

Nicolas Copernicus from Cornwall

The Copernicus robot has arrived from Great Britain, from a town called Falmouth in Cornwall, where the company Engineered Arts is located, which creates humanoid social robots. Our famous RoboThespian and his successors from the Robotic Theatre also came from there. The constructors and programmers from Engineered Arts build robots that are more and more “human”. State-of-the-art ones can look like a living person thanks to a realistic look of their silicone skin and a construction that convincingly imitates our bone structure. A few dozen of actuators set around the head and neck give our robot the capability to mimic human expressions: eye, jaw and head movements, following an interlocutor's eyes, smiling while talking.

Not one, but a few AI's

At the moment, there is no Artificial Intelligence yet that could replace all functions of the human brain at the same time. In order for a robot to react to its interlocutors, understand and answer questions, a few programmes are needed. The first is responsible for detecting human faces and following them with eyes. Thanks to the second one, Copernicus understands human speech, recognises the language, and turns the words he hears into text. Another programme allows for an interpretation of the text and providing an answer. That is the so-called conversational AI (GPT3 model). A separate AI accounts for the robot's voice and tries to make it sound as natural as possible. The last programme is a so-called human behaviour module, ensuring Copernicus has the possibility to move – to imitate breathing, as well as subtle head, arms and lips motions. Due to the synchronisation of the aforementioned programmes, our robotic Nicolas Copernicus strikingly resembles a human.