Abstract
Communication between humans and robots is a very critical step for the integration of social robots into society. Emotion expression through a robotic face is one of the key points of communication. Despite the most recent efforts, no matter how much expression capabilities improve, facial expression recognition is often hampered by a cultural divide between subjects that participate in surveys. The purpose of this work is to take advantage of the 24 degrees of freedom head of the humanoid social robot KOBIAN-R for making it capable of displaying different versions of the same expressions, using face and neck, in a way that they are easy to understand for Japanese and for Western subjects. We present a system based on relevant studies of human communication and facial anatomy, as well as on the work of illustrators and cartoonists. The expression generator we developed can be adapted to specific cultures. Results confirmed the in-group advantage, showing that the recognition rate of this system is higher when the nationality of the subjects and the cultural characterisation of the shown expressions are coincident. We conclude that this system could be used, in future, on robots that have to interact in a social environment, with people with different cultural background.
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.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beira, R., et al.: Design of the Robot-cub (iCub) Head. In: ICRA, pp. 94–100 (2006)
Oh, J.H., et al.: Design of Android type Humanoid Robot Albert HUBO. In: Proceedings of IROS (2006)
Itoh, K., et al.: Mechanical Design of Emotion Expression Humanoid Robot WE-4RII. In: 16th CISM-IFToMM Symposium on Robot Design, Dynamics and Control, pp. 255–262 (2006)
Endo, N., Takanishi, A.: Development of Whole-body Emotional Expression Humanoid Robot for ADL-assistive RT services. JRMÂ 23(6) (2011)
Breazeal, B.: Emotion and Sociable Humanoid Robots. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction 59, 119–155 (2002)
Beck, A., Hiolle, A., Mazel, A., Cañamero, L.: Interpretation of Emotional Body Language Displayed by Robots. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (2010)
Buck, R.: The communication of emotion. Guildford Press, New York (1984)
Elbfenbein, H.A., Ambady, N.: Universals and Cultural Differences in Recognizing Emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science 12(5), 159–164 (2003)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V.: Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17(2), 124–129 (1971)
Shimoda, K., et al.: The intercultural recognition of emotional expressions by three National racial groups: English, Italian and Japanese. In: EJSP, vol. 8, pp. 169–179 (1978)
Koda, T.: Cross-cultural evaluations of avatar facial expressions. In: Workshop on Enculturating Conversational Interfaces. IUI (2008)
Masaki, Y., Maddux, W.W., Masuda, T.: Are the windows to the soul the same in the East and West? Cultural differences in using the eyes and mouth as cues to recognize emotions in Japan and the US. J. of Experimental Social Psychology 43(2), 303–311 (2007)
Kishi, T., et al.: Development of Expressive Robotic Head for Bipedal Humanoid Robot with Wide Moveable Range of Facial Parts and Facial Color. In: Proceedings of 19th CISM-IFToMM Symposium on Robot Design (to be published, 2012)
Ogura, Y., et al.: Development of a new humanoid robot WABIAN-2. In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, pp. 76–81 (2006)
Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., Hager, J.C.: The Facial Action Coding System, 2nd edn. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London (2002)
Saldien, J., et al.: Expressing Emotions with the Social Robot Probo. International Journal of Social Robotics 2, 377–389 (2010)
Ribeiro, T., Paiva, A.: The illusion of robotic life: principles and practices of animation for robots. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2012)
Poggi, I.: Towards the Alphabet and the Lexicon of gesture, gaze and touch. In: Bouissac, P. (ed.) Multimodality of Human Communication. Theories, Problems and Applications, Virtual Symposium (2001-2002)
Poggi, I.: Le parole del corpo, Carrocci, Roma (2006) (in Italian)
Raudys, S., Duin, R.P.W.: On expected classification error of the Fisher linear classifier with pseudo-inverse covariance matrix. Pattern Recognition Letters 19(5-6), 385–392 (1998)
Poggi, I., Pelachaud, C.: Performative Facial Expressions in Animated Faces. In: Cassell, J., Sullivan, J., Prevost, S., Churchill, E. (eds.) Embodied Conversational Agents. MIT press, Cambridge (2000)
Plutchik, R.: Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Trovato, G., Kishi, T., Endo, N., Hashimoto, K., Takanishi, A. (2012). A Cross-Cultural Study on Generation of Culture Dependent Facial Expressions of Humanoid Social Robot. In: Ge, S.S., Khatib, O., Cabibihan, JJ., Simmons, R., Williams, MA. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7621. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34103-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34103-8_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34102-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-34103-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)