Development of an Android for Emotional Expression and Human Interaction

Abstract

This paper presents the second version of an Android, EveR-2 developed in KITECH (Korea Institute of Industrial Technology). EveR-2 is a female robot which name derives from Biblical 'Eve' plus the letter 'R' for Robot. EveR-2 is a robot platform to implement and test emotional expressions and human interactions. She can express facial emotion and synchronize lip with voice. Also it can make gestures like human. She can sense visual and speech information from CCD cameras in her eyes and microphone. The head, upper body, and lower body which compose of total 59 DOFs(Degree Of Freedom) make behaviors, facial expressions, and lip sync. Software structure has the robot-oriented conversation using a dialogue database, and hardware structure is designed for embedding all motors and sensors into the human-scale space. EveR-2 can be applied to guidance service of an exhibition, oral narration of fairy tale, and singing, and conversation with humans.