An articulated talking face for the iCub

Abstract

Recent developments in human-robot interaction show how the ability to communicate with people in a natural way is of great importance for artificial agents. The implementation of facial expressions has been found to significantly increase the interaction capabilities of humanoid robots. For speech, displaying a correct articulation with sound is mandatory to avoid audiovisual illusions like the McGurk effect (leading to comprehension errors) as well as to enhance the intelligibility in noise. This work describes the design, construction and testing of an animatronic talking face developed for the iCub robot. This talking head has an articulated jaw and four independent lip movements actuated by five motors. It is covered by a specially designed elastic tissue cover whose hemlines at the lips are attached to the motors via connecting linkages.

Probing the Inductive Biases of a Gaze Model for Multi-party Interaction

“…The dataset used is the RoboTrio2 corpus [4], a collaborative game with two human players, animated by an iCub robot [16] that is immersively teleoperated [2]. The robot transmits the voice of a human pilot located in an adjacent room and reproduces the pilot movements (eyes, head, lips).…”

“…The embedding layers do not appear to have encoded player gender information. If 3 groupings seem to emerge (22,19,20,21,15,17), (09, 18,14,16), and the isolated 13, it is difficult to explain them simply by To find any hidden relationships behind these clusters, we calculated correlations between the representation axes quantifiable social indices. Table 1 summarizes the correlations obtained after a Spearman test [14].…”

Beaming the Gaze of a Humanoid Robot

“…The eyes embed stereo cameras in a swivel mounting with degrees-of-freedom similar to human eyes (azimuth, elevation and vergence). IIT and GIPSA recently redesigned the iCub head [2] in order to enhance its communicative skills (see Figure 1). The new robot, called Nina, benefits from a new implantation of the eye tilt mechanism -together with the suppression of lower eyelids -that freed the space for a Visaton BF32 loudspeaker, two high-quality ear microphones plugged into the auricles and five additional motors for articulating the jaw and the lips.…”

Impact of iris size and eyelids coupling on the estimation of the gaze direction of a robotic talking head by human viewers

“…Lab recently collaborated to redesign the iCub head in order to enhance its communicative skills [19].…”