Design and Motion Capabilities of an Emotion-Expressive Robot EmoSan

Abstract

For the sake of the enhancement of non-verbal communication between humans, the head motion of the counterpart is highly important to guess the acceptance level and the affinity. The paper presents a new emotion-expressive robot focusing on emotional reactions represented in the head motion, which movements are realized by a parallel kind of robot based on the Gough-Stewart platform. Several workspaces of this robot have been analyzed in order to establish the capability of the robot to reproduce the movements of the human head. Our goal is an affective interaction between the human and robot, including a coupling through brain signals such as electroencephalography, known as EEG. If the signal processing is possible to implement into devices with robots, it may enhance to teach children in basic emotions through play, motivating their emotional excitement in an online way. The analysis of the robot motions by using the robotic device reveals that the importance of elements in the non-verbal communication and extends the possibility of the robot, which is capable of imitating the human movements even only the human head.