Development of a humanoid robot with mechanisms to realize exaggerated motions abstracted from a Japanese Bunraku puppet

Abstract

Japanese “Bunraku” puppets have attracted people by showing their impressive and emotional action, even though the structures and motions are different from human beings. The exaggerating and omission of motions, which include expansion and contraction, and high frequency shakings of the body, are effectively utilized to express humanistic emotions. This paper describes a novel humanoid robot which has mechanisms to reproduce functions and motions of Bunraku puppets by extracting the mechanism of a Bunraku puppet and operators. Motions of real Bunraku puppet were captured optically and processed by using kinematics to calculate the reference angles of every joint of the robot. Both motion data that include and exclude the exaggerated motions such as expansion and contraction of neck and chest were prepared and executed using the developed humanoid robot to be compared. It has been clearly shown that the motion with exaggeration is effective to express humanistic emotions.