Biologically inspired models and hardware for emotive facial expressions

Abstract

Socially intelligent robots are no longer an interesting topic of science fiction. In the robotics community, there is a growing interest in building personal robots, or in building robots that share the same workspace with humans. Natural interaction between humans and robots is therefore essential. To interact socially with humans, a robot must be able to do more than simply gather information about its surroundings; it must be able to express its states or emotions so that humans believe it has beliefs, desires, and intentions of its own. In the last decade, many researchers have focused on generating emotive facial expressions, which are known as the best cues for conveying the robot's state, intentions, feelings and emotions. This paper gives a brief overview of current robotic systems with emotive facial expressions and introduces the basic models and hardware of two different types of facial robotic systems.