Parameterized Facial Animation for Socially Interactive Robots

Abstract

Socially interactive robots with human-like speech synthesis and recognition, coupled with humanoid appearance, are an important subject of robotics and artificial intelligence research. Modern solutions have matured enough to provide simple services to human users. To make the interaction with them as fast and intuitive as possible, researchers strive to create transparent interfaces close to human-human interaction. Because facial expressions play a central role in human-human communication, robot faces were implemented with varying degrees of human-likeness and expressiveness. We propose a way to implement a program that believably animates changing facial expressions and allows to influence them via inter-process communication based on an emotion model. This will can be used to create a screen based virtual face for a robotic system with an inviting appearance to stimulate users to seek interaction with the robot.