Towards Natural Emotional Expression and Interaction: Development of Anthropomorphic Emotion Expression and Interaction Robots

In present research the advanced fundamental mechanical capabilities of anthropomorphic robots developed in Takanishi laboratory at Waseda University are to be enhanced in order to enable these robots to interact with humans in a natural way. The anthropomorphic robot KOBIAN is able to express human-like facial expressions and whole-body gestures. It is equipped with vision and audio sensors that allow it to react to interaction input from human partners and to generate an appropriate emotional expression response. Furthermore, the anthropomorphic flute playing robot WF-4RVI is technically able to perform a musical wind-instrument performance at the level of an intermediate human player. Using this fundamental technical capability the authors implemented a musical-based interaction system (MbIS) that enables the robot to collaboratively play together with human musicians in a natural way. For both of the introduced interaction systems, the authors present and discuss the result of various experiments that were done to examine how well the interaction with a robot resembles realistic human-to-human interaction.