Facial Expressions and Gestures to Convey Emotions with a Humanoid Robot

This paper presents the results of a perceptual study with ZECA (Zeno Engaging Children with Autism), a robot able to display facial expressions. ZECA is a robotic tool used to study human-robot interactions with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This study describes the first steps towards this goal. Facial expressions and gestures conveying emotions such as sadness, happiness, or surprise are displayed by the robot. The design of the facial expressions based on action units is presented. The participants answered a questionnaire intended to verify if these expressions with or without gestures were recognized as such in the corresponding video. Results show that participants were successfully able to recognize the emotion featured in the corresponding video, and the gestures were a valuable addition to the recognition.

[1]  Shrikanth S. Narayanan,et al.  Development of Socially Assistive Robots For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders , 2009 .

[2]  Antonio Cisternino,et al.  The FACE of autism , 2010, 19th International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication.

[3]  Janet B W Williams,et al.  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , 2013 .

[4]  L. Cañamero,et al.  Interpretation of emotional body language displayed by robots , 2010, AFFINE '10.

[5]  P. Ekman,et al.  What the face reveals : basic and applied studies of spontaneous expression using the facial action coding system (FACS) , 2005 .

[6]  M. den Uyl,et al.  The FaceReader: Online facial expression recognition , 2006 .

[7]  C. Breazeal.  Sociable Machines: Expressive Social Ex-change Between Humans and Robots , 2000 .

[8]  P. Ekman.  Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life , 2003 .

[9]  S. Preston,et al.  Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. , 2001, The Behavioral and brain sciences.

[10]  Kerstin Dautenhahn,et al.  ”Where is Your Nose?” - Developing Body Awareness Skills Among Children With Autism Using a Humanoid Robot , 2013, ACHI 2013.

[11]  D. Feil-Seifer,et al.  Defining socially assistive robotics , 2005, 9th International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, 2005. ICORR 2005..

[12]  Emilia I. Barakova,et al.  Expressing and interpreting emotional movements in social games with robots , 2010, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing.

[13]  M. Rutter.  Diagnosis and definition of childhood autism , 1978, Journal of autism and childhood schizophrenia.

[14]  David Hanson,et al.  Zeno: A cognitive character , 2008, AAAI 2008.