Toward rich facial expression by face robot

The paper investigates the communication with an intelligent machine such as a human-friendly robot in an environment where human and robot coexist. The face and its expressions are crucial for communication, so we developed a face robot which has a human-like face and can express facial expressions similar to a human being. The important factors of a face robot for communication with humans include: 1) it should be small and compact, and 2) it should be easy to control. Initially, we used air cylinders with pressurized air for the Mark I face robot which was 1.5 times bigger than a human face. We then decided to use electrical shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators to produce facial expressions (Mark II). We realised the human size face robot, but SMA did not have enough durability and power for expressing facial expressions. For Mark III we selected McKibben-type pneumatic actuator to display facial expressions. In this paper we show the development history of our face robot and discuss how to build the face robot by using the McKibben-type pneumatic actuator.

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