The Man Who Mistook His Girlfriend for a Robot

And K-Bot is a hit. In the weeks following the head's debut, stories appear in newspapers and television on six continents. Hanson receives an abundance of e-mails and phone calls: from scientists who want to collaborate, from companies that make prosthetics and surgical-training devices, from movie producers, from companies that make sex dolls. Androidworld.com, a Web site that serves up humanoid parts, software and news, places Hanson's robot at the top of its list of 22 head projects, enthusing: "WOW—this guy is clearly one of the top head builders in the WORLD."


For a 33-year-old UTD grad student, it's an extraordinary burst of attention. But at least in the short term, the whole thing plays out just the way the buzz had billed it: Hanson's K-Bot serves, for a moment, as a light interlude. No one asks why, of all the roboticists in the world, only Hanson appears to be attempting to build a robotic head that is indistinguishable in form and function from a human. No one points out that he is violating a decades-old taboo among robot designers. And no one asks him how he's going to do it—how he plans to cross to the other side of the Uncanny Valley.


David Hanson has the sort of mixed pedigree that might just be a prerequisite for tilting at robotic windmills. On his Web page, he identifies himself as a sculptor-roboticist.


He spent two years in the late '80s as an aimless physics major at the University of North Texas in Denton, where he pursued, as he puts it, "wild imaginative flights of fancy"—for example, turning his apartment into a "tropical paradise" (plants, parrots, tree frogs, a running stream) for a four-day party he and his friends called Disturbathon. "The high jinks," he says, "were top-notch." Such projects fueled an absenteeism habit; Hanson's grades suffered, which cost him his financial aid and forced him to leave school. Then, in 1992, he was accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design, one of the country's top art schools.


At RISD, Hanson alienated professors by building the Primordial Ooze Bath, an enormous installation in which art patrons crawled, slid, and swam about in gelatinous seaweed extract. Back during his years as a lonely, oddball teenager, Hanson had immersed himself in drawing and
sci-fi–Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov were favorites– and at RISD he managed, after a fashion, to meld his two passions. He took an artificial-intelligence class at nearby Brown University, and in 1995 he focused an independent-study project on "out-of-body experiences," building a remotely operated humanoid head on a retractable five-foot stalk. The head, which he sculpted as a self-portrait, wheeled from room to room and chatted with people (via a remote operator). "The idea was always hanging in my mind of turning a sculpture into a smart sentient being," he says.


After graduation, Hanson worked as an artist for six years, ending up at Disney in Los Angeles, where he sculpted theme-park characters, researched new materials, and hobnobbed with animatronics experts. In 2000, he saw Bar-Cohen speak at a conference on high-tech materials; at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Bar-Cohen was developing electroactive polymers to use as artificial muscles in NASA robots. Inspired, Hanson showed Bar-Cohen his portfolio, and Bar-Cohen decided to take a flier on this talented, motivated Walt Disney artist; he asked Hanson to write a book chapter describing how a network of artificial muscles could animate a robot. In early 2002, Bar-Cohen again tapped the talents of his young protégé, now a grad student at UTD; Bar-Cohen was preparing a presentation to NASA bigwigs on the agency's emerging robotics technology when he realized he needed some visual oomph—so he sent Hanson a plastic model of a human skull and gave him a week to build a head.