• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.4 no.4
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• pp.281-288
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• 2009

Nowadays, many robots have evolved to imitate human social skills such that sociable interaction with humans is possible. Socially interactive robots require abilities different from that of conventional robots. For instance, human-robot interactions are accompanied by emotion similar to human-human interactions. Robot emotional expression is thus very important for humans. This is particularly true for facial expressions, which play an important role in communication amongst other non-verbal forms. In this paper, we introduce a method of creating lifelike facial expressions in robots using variation of affect values which consist of the robot's emotions based on emotional boundaries. The proposed method was examined by experiments of two facial robot simulators.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.270-277
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• 2008

The development of a face robot basically targets very natural human-robot interaction (HRI), especially emotional interaction. So does a face robot introduced in this paper, named Buddy. Since Buddy was developed for a mobile service robot, it doesn't have a living-being like face such as human's or animal's, but a typically robot-like face with hard skin, which maybe suitable for mass production. Besides, its structure and mechanism should be simple and its production cost also should be low enough. This paper introduces the mechanisms and functions of mobile face robot named Buddy which can take on natural and precise facial expressions and make dynamic gestures driven by one laptop PC. Buddy also can perform lip-sync, eye-contact, face-tracking for lifelike interaction. By adopting a customized emotional reaction decision model, Buddy can create own personality, emotion and motive using various sensor data input. Based on this model, Buddy can interact probably with users and perform real-time learning using personality factors. The interaction performance of Buddy is successfully demonstrated by experiments and simulations.