Abstract
An important aspect for child and robot interactions in various therapy scenarios is the robot’s ability to convey emotions to the child. Due to the fact that 93% of human communication is non-verbal, these socially interactive robots need to have the ability to mimic non-verbal cues to the child, particularly through the use of facial expressions. In this paper, we discuss the ability for a socially interactive robot to emote emotions through a minimal set of features, i.e. soley through the eyes. In a study with five participants, we evaluate participants ability to recognize emotions based on the Plutchik emotion scale and the universal emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Results indicate that participants recognition of an emotion is maximum when the intensity of the emotion is not at the extreme ends of the Plutchik emotion scale.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Baron-Cohen S, O’Riordan M, Stone V, Jones R, Plaisted K (1999) Recognition of faux pas by normally developing children and children with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 29: 407-418
Bassili J (1979) Emotion recognition: The role of facial movement and the relative importance of upper and lower areas of the face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37(11): 2049-58
Beck A, Canamero L, Hiolle A, Damiano L, Cosi P, Tesser F et al. (2013) Interpretation of emotional body language displayed by a humanoid robot: A case study with children. International Journal of Social Robotics 5(3): 325-334
Bennett CC, Šabanović S (2014) Deriving minimal features for human-like facial expressions in robotic faces. International Journal of Social Robotics 6(3): 367-381
Black M, Yacoob Y (1997) Recognizing facial expressions in image sequences using local parameterized models of image motion. International Journal of Computer Vision 25(1): 23-48
Delaunay F, De Greeff J, Belpaeme T (2009) Towards retro-projected robot faces: An alternative to mechatronic and android faces. In: Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, pp. 306-311, Toyama International Conference Center, Japan
Ekman P (1992) Facial expressions of emotion: New findings, new questions. Psychological Science (3)1: 34-38
Ekman P, Friese WV (1971) Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17(2): 124-129
Howard A (2013) Robots learn to play: Robots emerging role in pediatric therapy. In: Proceedings of the 26th international Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference, St. Pete Beach, FL, USA
Li J, Chignell M (2011) Communication of emotion in social robots through simple head and arm movements. International Journal of Social Robotics 3(2): 125-142
Metta G, Sandini G, Vernon D, Natale L, Nori F (2008) The iCub humanoid robot: An open platform for research in embodied cognition. In: Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems, pp. 50-56, Washington DC, USA
Plutchik R (2011) The nature of emotions. American Scientist 89: 344-350
Saerbeck M, Schut T, Bartneck C, Janse M (2010) Expressive robots in education: Varying the degree of social supportive behavior of a robotic tutor. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1613-1622, Atlanta, GA, USA
Simmons R, Goldberg D, Goode A, Montemerlo M, Roy N, Sellner B et al. (2003) GRACE: An autonomous robot for the AAAI robot challenge. CMU, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Tiberius R, Billson J (1991) The social context of teaching and learning. New Directions for Teaching and Learning 1991(45): 67-86
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Cloutier, P., Park, H.W., MacCalla, J., Howard, A. (2016). It’s All in the Eyes: Designing Facial Expressions for an Interactive Robot Therapy Coach for Children. In: Langdon, P., Lazar, J., Heylighen, A., Dong, H. (eds) Designing Around People. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29498-8_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29498-8_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-29496-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-29498-8
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)