Design of the humanoid robot KOBIAN - preliminary analysis of facial and whole body emotion expression capabilities-

Personal robots and robot technology (RT)-based assistive devices are expected to play a major role in our elderly-dominated society, with an active participation to joint works and community life with humans, as partner and as friends for us. In particular, these robots are expected to be fundamental for helping and assisting elderly and disabled people during their activities of daily living (ADLs). To achieve this result, personal robots should be capable of human-like emotion expressions; in addition, human-like bipedal walking is the best solution for the robots which should be active in the human living environment. Although several bipedal robots and several emotional expression robots have been developed in the recent years, until now there was no robot which integrated all these functions. Therefore we developed a new bipedal walking robot, named KOBIAN, which is also capable to express human-like emotions. In this paper, we present the design and the preliminary evaluation of the new emotional expression head. The preliminary results showed that the emotion expressed by only the head cannot be really easily understood by the users. However, the presence of a full body clearly enhances the emotion expression capability of the robot, thus proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach.