Lifelike facial expression of mascot-type robot based on emotional boundaries

Nowadays, many robots have evolved to imitate human social skills such that sociable interaction with humans is possible. Socially interactive robots require abilities different from that of conventional robots. For instance, human-robot interactions are accompanied by emotion similar to human-human interactions, robot emotional expression is thus very important for humans. This is particularly true for facial expressions, which play an important role in communication amongst other non-verbal forms. In this paper, we introduce a method of creating lifelike facial expressions in robots using variation of affect values which consist of the robot's emotions based on emotional boundaries. The proposed method was examined by experiments of two facial robot simulators.