Implementation of Actors’ Emotional Talent into Social Robots Through Capture of Human Head’s Motion and Basic Expression

Abstract

The paper presents an initial step towards employing the advantages of educational theatre and implementing them into social robotics in order to enhance the emotional skills of a child and at the same time to augment robots with actors’ emotional talent. Emotional child-robot interaction helps to catch quickly a child’s attention and enhance information perception during learning and verbalization in children with communication disorders. An innovative approach for learning through art by transferring actors’ emotional and social talents to socially assistive robots is presented and the technical and artistic challenges of tracking and translating movements expressing emotions from an actor to a robot are considered. The goal is to augment the robot intervention in order to enhance a child’s learning skills by stimulating attention, improving timing of understanding emotions, establishing emotional contact and teamwork. The paper introduces a novel approach to capture movements and expressions of a human head, to process data from brain and inertial tracking devices and to transfer them into a socially assistive robot.