Contextual approach for defining of an emotion model for design of facial expressions of humanoids

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore a new method of establishing an emotion model for the design of facial expressions of humanoid robots. An emotion model is essential for deciding what emotions a robot should have. Most studies regarding emotion models and the facial expressions of robots have attempted to embody all expressions of humans without taking the robot’s use context and function into account. However, the premise that humanoids should express all kinds of emotions is questionable considering that humanoids can be specialized for a particular use and context such as in educational or caregiving applications. This thesis explores the facial expressions humanoids should have in certain contexts and the kinds of emotion models that should be developed to realize those expressions. The study is focused on educational humanoid robots. Sixty emotion related adjectives were elicited by applying contextual scenarios where users were asked to envision possible interactions in over 74 given scenarios in different contexts. Doing so can overcome the limits of research that does not consider a robot’s use context when it is specialized with particular functions. Appropriate facial expressions were derived after a frequency analysis, and an emotional dimension was found by a multi-dimensional scaling analysis on 23 adjectives with high frequency. The results showed that educational humanoid robots should dominantly express emotions related to ‘happiness’, implying that their facial expressions should be designed to express ‘happiness’ more diversely. The proposed contextual scenario based method of constructing an emotion model of a robot could be employed as a new method to envision interactions between human and robot in certain situations. Furthermore, emotional words elicited from those scenarios could be utilized to analyze the underlying structure of emotions that the humanoid should embody. The contextual scenario method can be utilized to...