Development of face robot to express the facial features

Abstract

There are personal equations in the facial features of a silhouette, position and shape of each part; eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and ears. Humans recognize individuality from facial features, and they express their mental states by facial expressions. Researchers have developed a robot that has a personality based on its experience dynamically and a robot that expresses emotion. We consider that a robot can communicate with a human more naturally, when it not only expresses its emotion with the face but also has facial features. However, robots that express facial features by changing feature-points have not been developed. Therefore, we developed a face robot that expresses its facial features. We propose both the mechanical model and the optical model to express the feature-points more clearly. We introduced the push-pull method with piano wires as the mechanical model and a projection method with a projector as the optical model. In the mechanical model, the face is covered with a mesh of piano wires and radio control type servomotors are used as actuators to control the facial feature-points. We change the shape of the face by pushing and pulling feature-points on the mesh with actuators. In the optical model, we project the images of several persons on the mechanical model. We describe the mechanical model and the optical model of the face robot.