Minimalist mechanical design and characterization of an Android for Human Robot Interaction

Design and Development of an Android (A robot with human resemblance and behaviour) is complex which requires high level of dexterity and cognitive capability. In the present work, we propose a low cost minimalist mechanical design of an android robot called ARIA (Advanced Robot for Interactive Applications) which has 12 Degrees of Freedom (DoF). ARIA is capable of expressing various emotions such as Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, and Tiredness etc, along with various neck articulations such as flexion, extension, lateral flexion and rotation. In the present work, we have adopted the minimalist design approach to design the android with an overall objective of reducing the design complexity and development time. We have described in detail the basic rationale behind minimalist design approach, the design of facial features, its kinematic linkage and actuation mechanisms; and finally we have conducted the experiments to characterize and validate the effectiveness of the facial expressions of the minimalist android. The experimental results reveal that the design trade-offs as a result of minimalist mechanical design highly impacts the interactive dynamics between humans and robot. The cognitive perceptions of humans towards androids demand more realistic facial expressions which were not possible to achieve using minimally designed ARIA.