NAO Robot Eyebrows

Description

Eyebrows or facial muscle movement tend to be key indicators of what emotion is being expressed by a person or an object. When it comes to the robots, however, neither of these features are available, making it increasingly challenging to convey a wide variety of emotions with only movement and speech. Due to the inability to change any facial muscles on the robot, it was decided that attempting to add eyebrows would be the best way to begin expressing a wider breadth of emotions.

One of the leading robots in the field of robot-human interaction is the NAO robot, so we decided to build off of a previously proposed model for pluggable eyebrows for these robots. In this study, we analyzed if the inclusion of pluggable eyebrows on the NAO robot will assist with its ability to convey different emotional expressions.

The project is documented here while an in-depth tutorial at how to set up a similar experiment is seen here.