Functions and Driving Mechanisms for Face Robot Buddy

얼굴로봇 Buddy의 기능 및 구동 메커니즘

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.