ExpressionBot: An emotive lifelike robotic face for face-to-face communication

This article proposes an emotive lifelike robotic face, called ExpressionBot, that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural face-to-face communication. The proposed robotic head consists of two major components: 1) a hardware component that contains a small projector, a fish-eye lens, a custom-designed mask and a neck system with 3 degrees of freedom; 2) a facial animation system, projected onto the robotic mask, that is capable of presenting facial expressions, realistic eye movement, and accurate visual speech. We present three studies that compare Human-Robot Interaction with Human-Computer Interaction with a screen-based model of the avatar. The studies indicate that the robotic face is well accepted by users, with some advantages in recognition of facial expression and mutual eye gaze contact.