A Face Robot Actuated with Artiflcial Muscle

Face robots capable of expressing their emotional status, can be adopted as an efficient tool for friendly communication between the human and the machine. In this paper, we present a face robot actuated with artificial muscle based on dielectric elastomer. By exploiting the properties of polymers, it is possible to actuate the covering skin, eyes as well as provide human-like expressivity without employing complicated mechanisms. The robot is driven by seven types of actuator modules such as eye, eyebrow, eyelid, brow, cheek, jaw and neck module corresponding to movements of facial muscles. Although they are only part of the whole set of facial motions, our approach is sufficient to generate six fundamental facial expressions such as surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness. Each module communicates with the others via CAN communication protocol fur the desired emotional expressions, the facial motions are generated by combining the motions of each actuator module. A prototype of the robot has been developed and several experiments have been conducted to validate its feasibility.

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