Human-like Facial Expressions Research Articles

An Investigation on Humanoid Robots with Biped Locomotion and Walking

Human figures move, speak, and perform actions through certain features, such as sensors and actuators. Android is a humanoid robot that looks like a human, while Ginoids look like female humans. Human figures function through certain features. Arts, the UK-based designer and creator of anthropological robots, recently posted a video on YouTube showing one of the most vivid works with sensors that can sense their environment. Amega, a robot, has been shown to create incredible human-like facial expressions, and in fantasy systems, the human figure is used to represent amazing creatures such as a dwarf, cub, cub. gnome, Halfling, goblin, Troll, orc or an ogre, and Bigfoot Actuators are the motors responsible for the robot's movement. Humanoid robots are designed to mimic the human body. Although with different structures, they use accelerators that act like muscles and joints. The actuators of humanoid robots can be electric, pneumatic or hydraulic. Well, almost. Recently, the UK-based robotics company Engineering Arts showcased its Artificial Intelligence (AI) anthropology robot Amega, which is almost bizarre. Anthropology robots, on the other hand, did not reach the target. Following humans in form and ambiguous function. They have very specific roles - More than just being a "do it all" assistant. Our own TUG mobile robots and the robot's Ramba are prime examples of humanoid robots, with many features such as flexible flexibility, law enforcement and motion redundancy. The humanoid robot assists working people by ensuring their care and complete safety. Such robots also work in factories and can perform repetitive tasks without any mistakes. Honda Motor Corporation's Asimov is known as the most sophisticated robot in the world due to its human appearance and ability to walk and climb stairs. Amega is a humanoid robot from the British company Engineering Arts. The company claims to be introducing 20 years of innovation in motion and natural gestures, with the ability to use sophisticated AI.

A Study on Humanoid Robots and Its Psychological Evaluation

. Humanoid robots are professional robots designed to mimic human movement and communication. Like all service robots, they provide value by automating tasks that lead to cost savings and productivity. Humanoid robots are a relatively new form of professional service robot. The humanoid robot is one of the humanoid robots developed by Hanson Robotics. Sophia has a human-like conversation and can express many human-like facial expressions. Human robots research and space exploration, personal assistance and maintenance, education and recreation, search and rescue, production and maintenance, public relations and health. Human figures move, speak and function through certain features such as sensors and actuators. Android is a human robot that looks like a human, while ginoids look like female humans. Human figures function through certain features. They have sensors that help them sense their surroundings, and they have many features such as Changeable flexibility, law enforcement and mobility. The humanoid robot assists working people by ensuring their care and complete safety. Such robots work in factories as well, while humanoid robots, which can perform repetitive tasks without error, are not intended to imitate humans in form and ambiguous function. They have more specific roles - than just being a “do it all” assistant. Our own TUG mobile robots and Robot's Rumba are every prime example of humanoid robots. Robots made in human form or in the shape of a human body - one head, one body, two arms and two legs. Androids are artificial creatures like humans, at least in appearance but also in behavior. Now available for purchase or rent for an undisclosed amount, the related Android labeled Ameca has beautiful face andmovable hands and is charged as the "perfect human robot operating system for human-robot communication"

Validation of dynamic virtual faces for facial affect recognition.

The ability to recognise facial emotions is essential for successful social interaction. The most common stimuli used when evaluating this ability are photographs. Although these stimuli have proved to be valid, they do not offer the level of realism that virtual humans have achieved. The objective of the present paper is the validation of a new set of dynamic virtual faces (DVFs) that mimic the six basic emotions plus the neutral expression. The faces are prepared to be observed with low and high dynamism, and from front and side views. For this purpose, 204 healthy participants, stratified by gender, age and education level, were recruited for assessing their facial affect recognition with the set of DVFs. The accuracy in responses was compared with the already validated Penn Emotion Recognition Test (ER-40). The results showed that DVFs were as valid as standardised natural faces for accurately recreating human-like facial expressions. The overall accuracy in the identification of emotions was higher for the DVFs (88.25%) than for the ER-40 faces (82.60%). The percentage of hits of each DVF emotion was high, especially for neutral expression and happiness emotion. No statistically significant differences were discovered regarding gender. Nor were significant differences found between younger adults and adults over 60 years. Moreover, there is an increase of hits for avatar faces showing a greater dynamism, as well as front views of the DVFs compared to their profile presentations. DVFs are as valid as standardised natural faces for accurately recreating human-like facial expressions of emotions.

Are friends electric? The benefits and risks of human-robot relationships.

SummarySocial robots that can interact and communicate with people are growing in popularity for use at home and in customer-service, education, and healthcare settings. Although growing evidence suggests that co-operative and emotionally aligned social robots could benefit users across the lifespan, controversy continues about the ethical implications of these devices and their potential harms. In this perspective, we explore this balance between benefit and risk through the lens of human-robot relationships. We review the definitions and purposes of social robots, explore their philosophical and psychological status, and relate research on human-human and human-animal relationships to the emerging literature on human-robot relationships. Advocating a relational rather than essentialist view, we consider the balance of benefits and harms that can arise from different types of relationship with social robots and conclude by considering the role of researchers in understanding the ethical and societal impacts of social robotics.

Dogs and humans respond to emotionally competent stimuli by producing different facial actions

The commonality of facial expressions of emotion has been studied in different species since Darwin, with most of the research focusing on closely related primate species. However, it is unclear to what extent there exists common facial expression in species more phylogenetically distant, but sharing a need for common interspecific emotional understanding. Here we used the objective, anatomically-based tools, FACS and DogFACS (Facial Action Coding Systems), to quantify and compare human and domestic dog facial expressions in response to emotionally-competent stimuli associated with different categories of emotional arousal. We sought to answer two questions: Firstly, do dogs display specific discriminatory facial movements in response to different categories of emotional stimuli? Secondly, do dogs display similar facial movements to humans when reacting in emotionally comparable contexts? We found that dogs displayed distinctive facial actions depending on the category of stimuli. However, dogs produced different facial movements to humans in comparable states of emotional arousal. These results refute the commonality of emotional expression across mammals, since dogs do not display human-like facial expressions. Given the unique interspecific relationship between dogs and humans, two highly social but evolutionarily distant species sharing a common environment, these findings give new insight into the origin of emotion expression.

Automatic Facial Expression Learning Method Based on Humanoid Robot XIN-REN

The ability of a humanoid robot to display human-like facial expressions is crucial to the natural human–computer interaction. To fulfill this requirement for an imitative humanoid robot, XIN-REN, an automatic facial expression learning method is proposed. In this method, first, a forward kinematics model, which is designed to reflect nonlinear mapping relationships between servo displacement vectors and corresponding expression shape vectors, is converted into a linear relationships between the mechanical energy of servo displacements and the potential energy of feature points, based on the energy conservation principle. Second, an improved inverse kinematics model is established under the constraints of instantaneous similarity and movement smoothness. Finally, online expression learning is employed to determine the optimal servo displacements for transferring the facial expressions of a human performer to the robot. To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, we conduct evaluation experiments on the forward kinematics model and the inverse kinematics model, based on the data collected from the robot's random states as well as fixed procedures by animators. Further, we evaluate the facial imitation ability with different values of the weighting factor, according to three sequential indicators (space-similarity, time-similarity, and movement smoothness). Experimental results indicate that the deviations in mean shape and position do not exceed 6 pixels and 3 pixels, respectively, and the average servo displacement deviation does not exceed 0.8%. Compared with other related studies, the proposed method maintains better space–time similarity with the performer, besides ensuring smoother trajectory for multiframe sequential imitation.

In dialogue with an avatar, language behavior is identical to dialogue with a human partner

The use of virtual reality (VR) as a methodological tool is becoming increasingly popular in behavioral research as its flexibility allows for a wide range of applications. This new method has not been as widely accepted in the field of psycholinguistics, however, possibly due to the assumption that language processing during human-computer interactions does not accurately reflect human-human interactions. Yet at the same time there is a growing need to study human-human language interactions in a tightly controlled context, which has not been possible using existing methods. VR, however, offers experimental control over parameters that cannot be (as finely) controlled in the real world. As such, in this study we aim to show that human-computer language interaction is comparable to human-human language interaction in virtual reality. In the current study we compare participants’ language behavior in a syntactic priming task with human versus computer partners: we used a human partner, a human-like avatar with human-like facial expressions and verbal behavior, and a computer-like avatar which had this humanness removed. As predicted, our study shows comparable priming effects between the human and human-like avatar suggesting that participants attributed human-like agency to the human-like avatar. Indeed, when interacting with the computer-like avatar, the priming effect was significantly decreased. This suggests that when interacting with a human-like avatar, sentence processing is comparable to interacting with a human partner. Our study therefore shows that VR is a valid platform for conducting language research and studying dialogue interactions in an ecologically valid manner.

Horses capable of humanlike facial expressions

Horses capable of humanlike facial expressions

Robots that Talk and Listen Judith A. Markowitz (editor) (President of J. Markowitz, Consultants, Chicago, IL) Berlin/Boston/Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 2015, hardbound, ISBN 978-1-61451-603-3; PDF, e-ISBN 978-1-61451-440-4 EPUB; e-ISBN 978-1-61451-915-7

<b>Robots that Talk and Listen</b> <b>Judith A. Markowitz (editor)</b> (President of J. Markowitz, Consultants, Chicago, IL) Berlin/Boston/Munich: Walter de Gruyter, 2015, hardbound, ISBN 978-1-61451-603-3; PDF, e-ISBN 978-1-61451-440-4 EPUB; e-ISBN 978-1-61451-915-7

Deriving Minimal Features for Human-Like Facial Expressions in Robotic Faces

This study explores deriving minimal features for a robotic face to convey information (via facial expressions) that people can perceive and understand. Recent research in computer vision has shown that a small number of moving points/lines can be used to capture the majority of information (\(\sim \)95 %) in human facial expressions. Here, we apply such findings to a minimalist robot face design, which was run through a series of experiments with human subjects (n = 75) exploring the effect of various factors, including added neck motion and degree of expression. Facial expression identification rates were similar to more complex robots. In addition, added neck motion significantly improved facial expression identification rates to 100 % for all expressions (except Fear). The Negative Attitudes towards Robots (NARS) and Godspeed scales were also collected to examine user perceptions, e.g. perceived animacy and intelligence. The project aims to answer a number of fundamental questions about robotic face design, as well as to develop inexpensive and replicable robotic faces for experimental purposes.

Towards Natural Emotional Expression and Interaction

In present research the advanced fundamental mechanical capabilities of anthropomorphic robots developed in Takanishi laboratory at Waseda University are to be enhanced in order to enable these robots to interact with humans in a natural way. The anthropomorphic robot KOBIAN is able to express human-like facial expressions and whole-body gestures. It is equipped with vision and audio sensors that allow it to react to interaction input from human partners and to generate an appropriate emotional expression response. Furthermore, the anthropomorphic flute playing robot WF-4RVI is technically able to perform a musical wind-instrument performance at the level of an intermediate human player. Using this fundamental technical capability the authors implemented a musical-based interaction system (MbIS) that enables the robot to collaboratively play together with human musicians in a natural way. For both of the introduced interaction systems, the authors present and discuss the result of various experiments that were done to examine how well the interaction with a robot resembles realistic human-to-human interaction.

Expression Cloning Based on Anthropometric Proportions and Deformations by Motion of Spherical Influence Zones

Virtual tridimensional creatures are active actors in many types of applications nowadays, such as virtual reality, games and computer animation. The virtual actors encountered in those applications are very diverse, but usually have humanlike behavior and facial expressions. This paper deals with the mapping of facial expressions between virtual characters, based on anthropometric proportions and geometric manipulations by moving influence zones. Facial proportions of a base model is used to transfer expressions to any other model with similar global characteristics (if the base model is a human, for instance, the other models need to have two eyes, one nose and one mouth). With this solution, it is possible to insert new virtual characters in real-time applications without having to go through the tedious process of customizing the characters’ emotions.

Development of Educational System with the Android Robot SAYA and Evaluation

This chapter describes an educational system with a tele-operated android robot, named SAYA, that can express human-like facial expressions and perform some communicative functions with its head and eye movements, and it is utilized as a role of a teacher. Two kinds of field experiments were conducted to investigate effectiveness of this educational system in actual educational fields. An experiment was conducted at both an elementary school and a university to estimate age-dependent differences of its effectiveness. The other experiment was carried out to verify whether children's interest, motivation, and concentration to the class, and science and technologies were enhanced.

Mechatronic design of the Twente humanoid head

This paper describes the mechatronic design of the Twente humanoid head, which has been realized in the purpose of having a research platform for human-machine interaction. The design features a fast, four degree of freedom neck, with long range of motion, and a vision system with three degrees of freedom, mimicking the eyes. To achieve fast target tracking, two degrees of freedom in the neck are combined in a differential drive, resulting in a low moving mass and the possibility to use powerful actuators. The performance of the neck has been optimized by minimizing backlash in the mechanisms, and using gravity compensation. The vision system is based on a saliency algorithm that uses the camera images to determine where the humanoid head should look at, i.e. the focus of attention computed according to biological studies. The motion control algorithm receives, as input, the output of the vision algorithm and controls the humanoid head to focus on and follow the target point. The control architecture exploits the redundancy of the system to show human-like motions while looking at a target. The head has a translucent plastic cover, onto which an internal LED system projects the mouth and the eyebrows, realizing human-like facial expressions.

Human-Oriented Interaction With an Anthropomorphic Robot

A very important aspect in developing robots capable of human-robot interaction (HRI) is the research in natural, human-like communication, and subsequently, the development of a research platform with multiple HRI capabilities for evaluation. Besides a flexible dialog system and speech understanding, an anthropomorphic appearance has the potential to support intuitive usage and understanding of a robot, e.g., human-like facial expressions and deictic gestures can as well be produced and also understood by the robot. As a consequence of our effort in creating an anthropomorphic appearance and to come close to a human- human interaction model for a robot, we decided to use human-like sensors, i.e., two cameras and two microphones only, in analogy to human perceptual capabilities too. Despite the challenges resulting from these limits with respect to perception, a robust attention system for tracking and interacting with multiple persons simultaneously in real time is presented. The tracking approach is sufficiently generic to work on robots with varying hardware, as long as stereo audio data and images of a video camera are available. To easily implement different interaction capabilities like deictic gestures, natural adaptive dialogs, and emotion awareness on the robot, we apply a modular integration approach utilizing XML-based data exchange. The paper focuses on our efforts to bring together different interaction concepts and perception capabilities integrated on a humanoid robot to achieve comprehending human-oriented interaction.

A Social Informatics Approach to Human–Robot Interaction With a Service Social Robot

The development of an autonomous social robot, Cherry, is occurring in tandem with studies gaining potential user preferences, likes, dislikes, and perceptions of her features. Thus far, results have indicated that individuals 1) believe that service robots with emotion and personality capabilities would make them more acceptable in everyday roles in human life, 2) prefer that robots communicate via both human-like facial expressions, voice, and text-based media, 3) become more positive about the idea of service and social robots after exposure to the technology, and 4) find the appearance and facial features of Cherry pleasing. The results of these studies provide the basis for future research efforts, which are discussed.