Robot with human-like, highly expressive facial features developed in China
Researchers devised a specialized motor command mapping network that serves as a conduit between the generated expression images and the robot’s realistic facial responses.
Professor Liu Xiaofeng stands next to a humanoid robot.
A team led by Professor Liu Xiaofeng at Hohai University in Jiangsu Province, China has developed a humanoid robot with highly expressive facial features.
The researchers created an algorithm for generating facial expressions on humanoid robots. They found that existing robots don’t give intricate and authentic facial expressions like humans, which can create issues during user engagement.
To address this challenge, the team developed a comprehensive two-stage methodology to empower their autonomous affective robot with the capacity to exhibit rich and natural facial expressions.
In the first stage, the algorithm generates nuanced robot facial expression images guided by Action Units (AUs). In the subsequent phase, the researchers actualize an affective robot with multifaceted degrees of freedom for facial movements, enabling it to embody the synthesized fine-grained facial expressions.
The study presents an innovative AU-driven facial expression disentangled synthesis method, which enables the generation of nuanced robot facial expression images guided by AUs.
Source: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-robot-with-expressive-facial-features