Facial Expression Using an Android Robot for Conveying Intentions in Communication

Abstract

Conversational robots with human-like appearances, such as android robots, are expected to appropriately combine verbal and nonverbal expressions to realize intelligent and natural behavior in communication. One of the most important perspectives for the robots is generating appropriate nonverbal motions based on the intent expressed in their utterance. In this paper, we implement nonverbal motions (facial expressions) using interest levels to the current dialogue topics and then evaluate how the robot's intentions were conveyed to subjects. Specifically, we analyze a multi-modal dialogue corpus, which is annotated with levels of interest, to implement the motions of the facial area and then implement the extracted typical behavior on the android robot. We evaluate the implemented behavior by a subjective evaluation with a scenario-based conversation to investigate the intention conveying performance.