This paper presents an anthropomorphic robotic bear for the exploration of human-robot interaction including verbal and non-verbal communications. This robot is implemented with a hybrid face composed of a mechanical faceplate with 10 DOFs and an LCD-display-equipped mouth. The facial emotions of the bear are designed based on the description of the Facial Action Coding System as well as some animal-like gestures described by Darwin. The mouth movements are realized by synthesizing emotions with speech. User acceptance investigations have been conducted to evaluate the likability of these facial behaviors exhibited by the eBear. Multiple Kernel Learning is proposed to fuse different features for recognizing user's facial expressions. Our experimental results show that the developed Bear-Like robot can perceive basic facial expressions and provide emotive conveyance towards human beings.
@cite_1: The BERT2 social robot, a platform for the exploration of human-robot interaction, is currently being built at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. This paper describes work on the robot's face, a hybrid face composed of a plastic faceplate and an LCD display, and our implementation of facial expressions on this versatile platform. We report the implementation of two representations of affect space, each of which map the space of potential emotions to specific facial feature parameters and the results of a series of human-robot interaction experiments to characterize the recognizability of the robot's archetypal facial expressions. The tested subjects' recognition of the implemented facial expressions for happy, surprised, and sad was robust (with nearly 100 recognition). Subjects, however, tended to confuse the expressions for disgusted and afraid with other expressions, with correct recognition rates of 21.1 and 52.6 respectively. Future work involves the addition of more realistic eye movements for stronger recognition of certain responses. These results demonstrate that a hybrid face with affect space facial expression implementations can provide emotive conveyance readily recognized by human beings.
Although much progress has been made to design aesthetic animal-like faces of these articulated robots, it is usually difficult to design the mechanic structures with multiple DOFs and jointly control them when displaying several complex facial behaviors such as mouth movement. In this case, the robot BERT2" @cite_1 was designed with a hybrid face including a plastic faceplate and an LCD display, where eye brows, eyes and mouth movement were displayed via graphics animation. The recognizability of BERT2's facial expressions were evaluated and verified through human-robot interaction experiments. Compared to BERT2, our eBear has 10 DOFs on the mechanical faceplate including ears, and it is able to blend the expressive movement with speech during mouth animation, which incorporates the benefits of both mechanical and graphical facial elements.