Development of animated facial expressions to express emotions in a robot: RobotIcon

Robotics is a field which does not only become more and more important in industry and production but is becoming part of many peoples every day life and as such, the interaction between robots and humans is an essential field of research. In this work, we present a face - being an important part of a natural communication - and show that animated facial expressions can be used to express the robot's emotions. To do so, we developed a set of animated facial expressions to be shown on the screen of the MASHI robot, a telepresence robot with a wide-screen display mounted on top. A survey was conducted to evaluate the recognition value of the facial expressions as well as to evaluate whether displaying the full face or rather just the eye-region affects this recognition rate. The evaluation of this survey shows that most of our emotions are recognized better if a mouth is provided. Yet, the recognition rate is still acceptable without displaying the mouth. In summary, all emotions were well recognized and therefore, displaying these on robots like MASHI will contribute to a more natural human-robot interaction.