Affect Displays with Color Expression of Teardrop in the Teary-eyed Robot

Abstract

Human tears have an effect as an empathic signal that visually conveys evoked strong affects or emotions to them. We focused on human tears as an expression method with strong affects or emotions and developed a teary-eyed robot called Tearoid. Tearoid has the structure of mimicking human lacrimal apparatus and generates the teardrops by controlling the inflow of tears. However, the affect displays of the kinds for the teardrops with various affects or emotions were not examined so far. Therefore, if the robot’s affects or emotions can be inferred from various teardrops, it becomes a new empathic expression for humanoid robots. In this study, we proposed new affect displays that enhance affective expressions by adding color to the teardrops that flow into the Tearoid. It was confirmed that the colored teardrops express various affects or emotions even if the facial expressions do not change.