See and Be Seen – Rapid and Likeable High-Definition Camera-Eye for Anthropomorphic Robots

Abstract

While many social robots already include carefully designed robotic faces, functional robot eyes that meet human expectations are still an open challenge. As a consequence, many robots either have cameras separated from their robot eyes or active camera heads missing an anthropomorphic face. In this paper, we propose a new robot eye that is integrated in the anthropomorphic robot head Floka and fulfills a similar technical specification as a human eye including zero backlash, an increased range of motion, high velocities and accelerations, an integrated high resolution camera, and fast actuated eyelids. The robot eye is built using state-of-the-art off-the-shelf components and the CAD model of our prototype is available free of charge on request for non-commercial applications. We evaluate the technical properties of the robot eye and show that it meets and partially outperforms human eye movements and saccades.