Abstract

Understanding of human expressions and action intentions is crucial to improve the intelligence of the social robots. The social robots can also perform mirror behaviors to learn from and understand others. Here we present an intelligent framework in which a humanoid social robot can simulate human facial expressions and emulate human head motions. To fulfill these requirements, an intelligent interactive robot control framework which can simulate human facial expressions and head motions is proposed. We developed a physical animatronic robotic head platform with soft skin, whose expressions can be adjusted through the customized mechanical dynamic structure. A vision-based facial expression and head motion recognition method is proposed to establish the understanding mechanism of the expression and action intention of the intelligent robot using deep learning framework. Finally, the recognition results are employed to determine the optimal motor displacements for transferring the head states of a human to the robot. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can maintain high accuracy when facing different human subjects. The comprehensive evaluation shows that our method can perform accurate and real-time facial expression generation and head mirror behavior, which has a promising application for home assistant robots.

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