Control of a SMA actuated artificial face via neuro-fuzzy techniques

This paper reports a preliminary effort in designing and constructing an artificial face to mimic human facial expressions. The face was built over the surface of a plastic human-size skull, with shape memory alloy (SMA) wires providing the needed actuation in place of human muscles. Due to the special properties that they have, the modeling and control aspects of the SMA wires constitute a great challenge to the success of our objective. In this work, a special configuration of neural networks is adopted for the purpose. Various selected points on the artificial face, including the opening and closing of the mouth, are controlled as such to emulate human expressions. A software face model is also implemented for interfacing. Overall acceptable performance is demonstrated experimentally.