Calibrate My Smile

Abstract

Social robots often have expressive faces. However, it is not always clear how to design expressions that show a certain emotion. We present a method for a social robot to learn the emotional meaning of its own facial expressions, based on which it can automatically generate faces for any emotion. The robot collects data from an imitation game where humans are asked to mimic the robot's facial expression. The interacting person does not need to explicitly input the meaning of the robot's face so the interaction is natural. We show that humans can successfully recognise the emotions from the learned facial expressions.