Realistic facial expressions by SMA driven face robot

The goal of this study is to investigate the intelligence of non-verbal communication taking place between an anthropomorphic agent and a human when the agent works together with human. For this purpose, it seems necessary to build an anthropomorphic robot as a test bed and/or platform that can recognize and express nonverbal messages. As faces and facial expressions are crucial for non-verbal communication, we have been developing a human-like robot face that can express facial expressions. The important factor of such a robot face is the realism of the face and facial expressions. We used air cylinders with pressurized air for the Mark I robot face, but now we have decided to use an SMA (shape memory alloy) actuators driven by electricity. In this paper, we present the prototype SMA-actuated robot face and show its capability of producing six kinds of realistic facial expression: surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sad and happy. Kansei evaluation of these facial expressions shows good expressiveness in the robotic facial expressions.

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