A future in which androids look and feel so much like humans that they start to believe they are actually alive - as depicted in the film Blade Runner - may soon be reality. Scientists in Japan have invented a robot that can'feel' pain and is programmed to visibly wince when an electric charge is applied to its synthetic skin. The team from Osaka University is hoping that coding pain sensors into machines will help them develop empathy to human suffering, so they can act as more compassionate companions. For lead researcher Prof Minoru Asada, who is also President of the Robotics Society of Japan, the question of whether robots could one day seem human is almost irrelevant. "In Japan we believe all inanimate objects have a soul, so a metal robot is no different from a human in that respect, there are less boundaries between humans and objects," he said.

An eerie robot with the face of a small child can make realistic-looking facial expressions. Creepy footage shows Affetto, an android with just a head and no body mimic human expressions like smiling and frowning. The robot was made by researchers from Osaka University in Japan who say it could open the door for androids to have'deeper interactions with humans'. Affetto, who has flesh-coloured skin on its face, can mimic a range of human expressions with incredible accuracy. An eerie robot with the face of a small child can make realistic-looking facial expressions.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. A trio of researchers at Osaka University has now found a method for identifying and quantitatively evaluating facial movements on their android robot child head. Named Affetto, the android's first-generation model was reported in a 2011 publication.

Japanese engineers have created yet another robot baby, because, you know, you can't have enough of a good thing. Affetto is a tabletop baby head that's cute enough to be in the next Chucky film. Scientists seem to have an insatiable desire to study baby development not by studying real babies, but by building robot babies. Designed to look like a 1- or 2-year-old child (minus the body), Affetto has realistic facial expressions and is meant to be treated as a human being by caregivers. It has lifelike eyes and can open its mouth.