Today’s robots may be astonishing, scary, or militarily useful, but they rarely move with all the occasional grace, jitters, and other subtle quirks that humans have. That may change with some new research from Georgia Tech.

Though robots are increasingly hitting the headlines, and some of them are getting clever at replicating animal locomotion (visions of Boston Dynamics’ Big Dog will skitter across your memory at this point) the devices are still driven by motors, gears, and actuators commanded by cold, hard silicon so they tend to operate with obviously artificial movements. This means they miss out on some of the non-verbal modes of communication that humans use all the time–often without thinking about them–which also impacts on how humans perceive the bots.

Which is where research from Georgia Tech comes in. Based on their research droid Simon who looks distinctly robotic with a comedic head and glowing “ears,” a team working in the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab has been trying to teach Simon to move like humans do–forcing less machine-like gestures from his solid limbs. The trick was to record real human subjects performing a series of moves in a motion-capture studio, then taking the data and using it to program Simon, being careful (via a clever algorithm) to replicate the fluid multiple-joint rotations a human body does when swinging a limb between one position and the next, and which robot movements tend to avoid.

Then the team got volunteers to observe Simon in action, and asked them to identify the kinds of movements he was making. When a more smooth, fluid robot movement was made, the volunteers were better at identifying the gesture compared to a more “robotic” movement. To double-check the algorithm’s effectiveness the researchers then asked the human volunteers to mimic the gestures they thought the robot was making, tapping into the unconscious part of their minds that recognize human tics: And again, the volunteers were better at correctly mimicking the gesture when the human-like algorithm was applied to Simon’s moves.