Expressive Face of Robots

There are several projects that focus on the development of expressive robot faces, ranging in appearance from being graphically animated, to resembling a mechanical cartoon, to pursuing a more organic appearance. For instance, the typically resembling a Japanese woman that incorporate hair, teeth, silicone-skin and a large number of control points that map to the facial action units of the human face. Using a camera mounted in the left eyeball, the robot can recognize and produce a predefined set of emotive facial expressions (corresponding to anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sorrow and surprise).

A number of simpler expressive faces have been developed, one of which can adjust its amount of eye-opening and neck posture in response to light intensity. The robot is a Lego-based face robot used to explore tactile and affective interactions with people. It is increasingly common to integrate expressive faces with mobile robots that engage people in educational or entertainment setting, such as museum tour guide robots.

As expressive faces are incorporated into service or entertainment robots, there is a growing interest in understanding how humans react to and interact with them. For instance, explored techniques for characterizing people’s mental models of robots and how this is influenced by varying the robot’s appearance and dialog to make it appear either more playful and extraverted or more caring and serious.