eBear: An Expressive Bear-Like Robot

TL;DR

This paper introduces eBear, an expressive robotic bear designed for human-robot interaction, capable of recognizing facial expressions and conveying emotions through a hybrid face and speech synthesis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel anthropomorphic robotic bear with a hybrid face and emotion recognition capabilities, advancing human-robot interaction research.

Findings

eBear can perceive basic facial expressions.

The robot effectively conveys emotions through facial movements.

User acceptance of eBear's expressive behaviors is positive.

Abstract

This paper presents an anthropomorphic robotic bear for the exploration of human-robot interaction including verbal and non-verbal communications. This robot is implemented with a hybrid face composed of a mechanical faceplate with 10 DOFs and an LCD-display-equipped mouth. The facial emotions of the bear are designed based on the description of the Facial Action Coding System as well as some animal-like gestures described by Darwin. The mouth movements are realized by synthesizing emotions with speech. User acceptance investigations have been conducted to evaluate the likability of these facial behaviors exhibited by the eBear. Multiple Kernel Learning is proposed to fuse different features for recognizing user's facial expressions. Our experimental results show that the developed Bear-Like robot can perceive basic facial expressions and provide emotive conveyance towards human beings.