2P2-C20 Robotic Telecommunication System based on Facial Information Measurement

Abstract

This paper proposes a multi-modal telecommunication system using a facial expression robot. Traditional telecommunication methods mostly utilize speech only, but knowledge of the expressions and gesture information of the remote party is regarded to be important for smoother communication. Additionally, there are many researches about smooth communication using a robot. We developed a telecommunication system which projects facial expression of an operator to a remote place using facial expression robot "Infanoid2." The facial information of a user is measured using a stereo camera system and is projected to a robot used to communicate with another person in a remote location. Two evaluation experiments are performed using this system. It has been shown that the proposed system can convey the operators' emotion remotely. This paper discusses the effectiveness of robots as a telecommunication medium based on the experimental results.