Understanding humanoid robots could save your life: Companion

One of the twists in Companion depends on faulty assumptions about the internal anatomy of a humanoid robot. See the latest Science Robotics article on the science behind the fiction in Companion here.

The movie Companion is the latest, and most entertaining, iteration of the idea of a robot as the perfect girlfriend. The concept has been around in the movies since 1919, long before the term “robot” was even invented in 1926, when the silent film The Doll was first shown. Unlike R.U.R. and Metropolis, The Doll was a comedy. Companion is a science fiction horror variation with a Philip K. Dick twist: a stereotypical nice girlfriend commits a murder at weekend outing to a cabin in the woods, unaware that she is a robot (call back to PKD's The Electric Ant).

Spoilers follow: While the plot and setting fall firmly into slasher movie tropes, the movie goes in an unexpected direction because the entitled boyfriend (Hughie from The Boys) is narcissistic enough to attempt to take a shortcut to riches by jailbreaking the humanoid robot so it can commit murder. But, big mistake, he is too much of a slacker to bother to learn about how humanoid robots are built.  

As the Science Robotics article points out, the head of a humanoid robot usually doesn't have the "brain" processors- they get shoved into the torso because of the actuators and cameras take up all the space in head and center of gravity constraints favor putting as much hardware as low in the body frame as possible.

Check out the Science Robotics article but watch the movie- it's much better than the ratings suggest- and enjoy how the body count accelerates amid some droll swipes at technology and a joyous visual reference to Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Jack Quaid plays against his usual nice, soy boy casting, Guillermo from What We Do in the Shadows is great, and Rupert Friend gets the fun role usually given to Michael Shannon (but with a twist- lots of twists in the movie).

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