Development of a generic method to generate upper-body emotional expressions for different social robots

Abstract

To investigate the effect of gestures in human–robot interaction, a number of social robots capable of gesturing have been designed. Gestures are often preprogrammed off-line or generated by mapping motion capture data to the robot. Since these gestures are dependent on the robot’s joint configuration, they cannot be used for other robots. Therefore, when using a new robot platform with a different morphology, new joint trajectories to reach the desired postures need to be implemented. This method aims to minimize the workload when implementing gestures on a new robot platform and facilitate the sharing of gestures between different robots. The innovative aspect of this method is that it is constructed independently of any robot configuration, and therefore it can be used to generate gestures for different robot platforms. To calculate a gesture for a certain configuration, the developed method uses a set of target gestures listed in a database and maps them to that specific configuration. The database currently consists of a set of emotional expressions. The method was validated on the virtual model of different robots and an online survey was performed to evaluate the user’s perception of the output of the method. The results of this survey showed that the calculated gestures for a certain robot configuration well resemble the target gestures, and thus that our developed method to map gestures to different robot morphologies gives good results.