Remarks on designing of emotional movement for simple communication robot

Abstract

This paper investigates the emotional movements of a robot in order to express emotions by the robot that has low degree of freedom in its mechanism. The emotional movements are designed based on the Laban movement theory and the Ekman's basic emotions. The emotional movements that express 6 emotions, such as joy, sadness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust, are designed for the robot with low degree of freedom that only the head and both arms can move. In order to estimate the emotion which a human feels from the designed emotional movements of the robot, the subjectively evaluation experiments are carried out. Experimental results confirm both the feasibility and the effectiveness of the designed emotional movements to express the emotion with the low degree of freedom robot. The results obtained in this study are: (1) an emotion expression is possible with only the low degree of freedom body motion of the robot, however some emotions, such as anger and disgust, are not relatively easy to express, (2) the emotional movements except for anger are estimated in the designed emotional category regardless of the existence of the prior information of the emotion, and (3) the emotional impressions of anger and disgust depend on appearances of the robot while the emotional impressions of joy, sadness, surprise, and fear do not depend on the appearances.