It’s in Your Eyes: Which Facial Design is Best Suited to Let a Robot Express Emotions?

Abstract

It has been shown that emotional expressiveness makes robots appear more lifelike and believable. However, the facial design of commercially available robots is currently often not sufficient to convey emotions. We developed five facial design variants for a humanoid robot which can be used to display basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, fear) using different cartoon-inspired design approaches. These design variants were put on the head of the Pepper robot in cartoon-style drawings and tested in a quantitative user study. The findings indicate that the design approach of presenting the eyes on a large display and omitting the mouth is best suited to convey emotions, especially happiness and anger. Future work will improve the designs for sadness and fear, develop new designs for additional emotions and further investigate the role of the mouth design for emotional expressiveness of the robot.