Generation of robot facial gestures based on facial actions and animation principles

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to generate diverse robot facial expressions and facial gestures in order to help long-term HRI. First, nine basic dynamics for diverse robot facial expressions are determined based on the dynamics of human facial expressions and principles of animation for even identical emotions. In the second stage, facial actions are added to express facial gestures such as sniffling or wailing loudly corresponding to sadness, laughing aloud or smiling corresponding to happiness, etc. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we compared the facial expressions of the developed robot when the proposed method is used or not. The results of the survey showed that the proposed method can help robots generate more realistic facial expressions.