Abstract
As the elderly population continues to expand, there is a corresponding rise in the demand for service robotics in home environments, with a particular focus on humanoid service robots. This paper presents the design of a multi-DoF robotic head based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The head comprises 26 servo motors that drive the independent Action Units on the face, enabling the imitation of facial expressions following the FACS theory. Additionally, a camera is embedded in the eye for visual perception and interaction, while a 6-DOF Stewart platform driven by six servo motors is integrated as the neck part, ensuring the head’s flexibility of movement. Finite element simulation experiments are conducted to validate the robotic facial expression imitation performance of 6 basic expressions including happy, sad, surprise, fear, anger and disgust. The optimized load parameters of the corresponding action units are obtained through simulation, allowing for effective facial expression imitation. The proposed robotic head with facial expression imitation functionality has potential utility for improving human-robot interaction in homecare scenarios and the service quality of the homecare robots.
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Acknowledgment
This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51975513), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China (No. LR20E050003), the Major Research Plan of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51890884), the Major Research Plan of Ningbo Innovation 2025 (No. 2020Z022), and the Bellwethers Research and Development Plan of Zhejiang Province (No. 2023C01045). Some image elements were downloaded from https://www.freepik.com.
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Li, J., Lv, H., Zhang, N., Wu, H., Yang, G. (2023). Design and Realization of a Multi-DoF Robotic Head for Affective Humanoid Facial Expression Imitation. In: Yang, H., et al. Intelligent Robotics and Applications. ICIRA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14267. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6483-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6483-3_3
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