2009 Volume 8 Issue 2 Pages 127-136
This paper explores what facial expressions humanoids in certain contexts should have and what kinds of emotional spaces should be developed to realize those expressions. Most research regarding the facial expressions of robots have attempted to embody all expressions of human without taking the robot’s use context and function into account. In this study, we focused on educational humanoid robots and elicited 60 kinds of emotion related adjectives by applying contextual scenarios where users were asked to envision possible interactions in over 74 given scenarios in different context. Doing so can overcome the limits of research which does not consider a robot’s use context when it is specialized for particular uses and context. Appropriate facial expressions were derived after frequency analysis, and an emotional dimension was found by MDS (multi-dimensional scaling) on 23 adjectives with high frequency. The result showed that educational humanoid robots should dominantly express emotions related to ‘happiness’, implying that their facial expressions should be designed to express ‘happiness’ more diversely. Finally this study suggests that emotion of ‘happiness’ can be segmented into three intensity groups: high-arousal happiness, mid-arousal happiness, and quiet-arousal happiness; thus, facial expressions should be designed correspondingly in order to enrich human-robot interaction.
