An Analysis of Facial Morphology for the Robot Assisted Smile Recovery

Expression based non verbal communication accounts for a significant amount of the information exchange in human communication. In order to recreate facial expressions artificially for conveying an exact message it is necessary to make them as natural as possible since human beings posses a remarkable ability to recognize the emotion from an expression. In this paper we try to analyze facial expressions in terms of facial skin displacements from an anatomical point of view. We have been developing a wearable device, robot mask, to support and recreate human facial expressions by using artificial muscles. We conducted several experiments involving a comparison of the skin displacement along the facial muscles for natural expressions and artificially generated expressions. The experimental results contribute significantly to design criteria of robot mask. This paper also explains how shape memory alloy based artificial muscles can be used to generate facial expressions artificially.