Design and Evaluation of Emotion-Display EDDIE

This paper focuses on the development of EDDIE, a flexible low-cost emotion-display with 23 degrees of freedom. Actuators are assigned to particular action units of the facial action coding system (FACS). Emotion states represented by the circumplex model of affect are mapped to individual action units. Thereby, continuous, dynamic, and realistic emotion state transitions are achieved. EDDIE is largely developed and manufactured in a rapid-prototyping process. Miniature off-the-shelf mechatronics components are used providing high functionality at low-cost. Evaluations conducted in a user-study show that emotions can be recognized very well. Further experiments show that additional features adapted from animals have significant but small influence on the display of the human emotion 'disgust'