Discrimination and Implementation of Emotions on Zoomorphic Robot Movements

Abstract

This paper discusses discrimination and implementation of emotions on a zoomorphic robot aiming at designing emotional robot movements and improving robot friendliness. We consider four emotions; joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Two opposite viewpoints, performer and observer, are considered to acquire emotional movement data for analysis. The performer subjects produce emotional movements and movements that are easy to be recognized as expressions of the intended emotion are selected among the measured movements by the observer subjects. Discriminating the emotion embedded in a movement is tried using feature values based on the Laban movement analysis (LMA) and the principal component analysis (PCA). By the discrimination using PCA, the resultant rates of the correct discrimination are about 70% for all four emotions. The features of emotional movements are presumed from the coefficients of the discrimination function obtained in the emotion discrimination using PCA. Emotions are implemented by converting a setup for basic movements by employing the design principle based on the movement features. The result of the verification experiment suggests that four emotional movements are divided into two groups; the joy and anger group and the sadness and fear group. The emotional movements of joy or anger are dynamic, large-scale and frequent being relatively easy to interpret the intended emotion, while the emotional movements of sadness or fear are static, small-scale and little making difficult to understand the feature of movements.