Evaluating facial displays of emotion for the android robot Geminoid F

Abstract

With android robots becoming increasingly sophisticated in their technical as well as artistic design, their non-verbal expressiveness is getting closer to that of real humans. Accordingly, this paper presents results of two online surveys designed to evaluate a female android's facial display of five basic emotions. We prepared both surveys in English, German, and Japanese language allowing us to analyze for inter-cultural differences. Accordingly, we not only found that our design of the emotional expressions “fearful” and “surprised” were often confused, but also that many Japanese participants seemed to confuse “angry” with “sad” in contrast to the German and English participants. Although similar facial displays portrayed by the model person of Geminoid F achieved higher recognition rates overall, portraying fearful has been similarly difficult for the model person. We conclude that improving the android's expressiveness especially around the eyes would be a useful next step in android design. In general, these results could be complemented by an evaluation of dynamic facial expressions of Geminoid F in future research.