Most of the best robots, ones that can walk, run, climb steps, and do parkour, do not have faces, and there may be a good reason for that. If any of them did have mugs like the one on this new research robot, we'd likely stop in our tracks in front of them, staring wordlessly as they ran right over us.
Building robots with faces and the ability to mimic human expressions is an ongoing fascination in the robotics research world but, even though it might take less battery power and fewer load-bearing motors to make it work, the bar is much much higher for a robot smile than it is for a robot jump.
