Design of a Realistic Robotic Head based on Action Coding System

Abstract

In this paper, the development of a robotic head able to move and show di erent emotions is addressed. The movement and emotion generation system has been designed following the human facial muscu- lature. Starting from the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), we have built a 26 actions units model that is able to produce the most relevant movements and emotions of a real human head. The whole work has been carried out in two steps. In the rst step, a mechanical skeleton has been designed and built, in which the di erent actuators have been inserted. In the second step, a two-layered silicon skin has been manu- factured, on which the di erent actuators have been inserted following the real muscle-insertions, for performing the di erent movements and gestures. The developed head has been integrated in a high level be- havioural architecture, and pilot experiments with 10 users regarding emotion recognition and mimicking have been carried out.