Development of facial expressions generator for emotion expressive humanoid robot

Human-robot communication is a very important aspect in the field of Humanoid Robotics. Non-verbal communication is one of the components that make interaction natural. However, despite the most recent efforts, robots still can show only limited expression capabilities. The purpose of this work is to create a facial expression generator that can be applied to the new 24 DoF head of the humanoid robot KOBIAN-R. In this paper, we present a system based on relevant studies of human communication and facial anatomy, adapted to the specific robotic face. It makes use of polynomial classifiers and is able to produce over 600 thousands of facial cues combinations, together with appropriate neck movement. Results showed that the recognition rate of expressions produced by this system is comparable to the rate of recognition of the most common facial expressions. We conclude that our system can successfully improve the communication capabilities of the robot KOBIAN-R, and that there is potential for using it to implement more complex interaction.