When we first covered the emerging field of lovotics, the science of human-robot love, we had no idea that it would turn out to be one of the most popular stories ever published on ExtremeTech. It seems, as a culture, we have a deep-seated interest in robots and automatons, and if we can love an animal or other non-humanoid creature, what’s to stop us from falling in love with a robot? And if you had the choice of falling in love with an amorphous, decidedly odd-looking furball, or a cute, perky anime girl, which would you choose?

Introducing Meka Robotics’ S2 Humanoid Head: It has seven degrees of freedom, high-resolution FireWire cameras in each eye, zero-backlash Harmonic Drive gearing in the neck, and a ton of unnervingly-human movements and postures. She weighs 7.6kg (16.7lbs), has a pair of luminous, waggling doggy-like ears, and can be attached to a Meka torso and arm, if you prefer your robots to be slightly more corporeal. The girly, anime face is just a custom skin, incidentally: Meka will customize the shell to look like anything you desire. We’re told that they value their client’s confidentiality — and more importantly they don’t judge.

At this point you should watch the two videos below, the first of which was shot by IEEE Spectrum at the Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference in San Francisco. The most stand-out feature is definitely the expressiveness of the eyes, but the slow, smooth, and yet oddly decisive moves are also very human.

Now, as far as lovotics go, the head and arm in the video are controlled by Meka’s M3 real-time (open-source!) control software — and with M3, robot behavior can be scripted using a Python API, or with full-blown C++ plug-ins. In other words, it would be entirely possible — quite easy, even — to take the artificial endocrine and psychological models created by Hooman Samani, and implement them in Meka’s humanoid robots. Before you know it, we could be eschewing biological, meatbag companionship and opting for simpler, cleaner, and far more predictable robot lovers.

The only real barrier to robotic companionship, then, is pricing: the S2 Humanoid Head, along with a robot arm or two, costs somewhere in the region of $300,000. Still, the cost can only come down — and there are surely some rich, technophile millionaires who would happily fork over that kind of cash for their very own anime girl.

Read more at Meka Robotics