Expressive Robotic Face for Interaction

This paper describes the current development status of a robot head with basic interactional abilities. On a theoretical level we propose an explanation for the lack of robustness implicit in the so-called social robots. The fact is that our social abilities are mainly unconscious to us. This lack of knowledge about the form of the solution to these abilities leads to a fragile behaviour. Therefore, the engineering point of view must be seriously taken into account, and not only insights taken from human disciplines like developmental psychology or ethology. Our robot, built upon this idea, does not have a definite task, except to interact with people. Its perceptual abilities include sound localization, omnidirectional vision, face detection, an attention module, memory and habituation. The robot has facial features that can display basic emotional expressions, and it can speak canned text through a TTS. The robot’s behavior is controlled by an action selection module, reflexes and a basic emotional module.