Animation of expressions in a mechatronic head

Abstract

In this work, a method for animating a mechatronic head with realistic appearance is presented. The required actuators have been defined upon the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The generation of the six basic emotions is addressed: happiness, disgust, sadness, anger, fear and surprise. These expressions are generated by interpolating movements through a sequence of key poses. The voice is integrated in a similar way, using a viseme-based scheme that allows synchronizing voice, lips and mouth movements. Implementation details and results showing suitability of the approach are also given.