Non-verbal communication-based emotion incitation robot

This paper introduces a robot system by which emotions are incited based on non-verbal communication, i.e., a series of motion such as eye movement. The designed and developed robot system comprises mainly three parts of an eyeball robot, an eyeball robot controller, and an emotion recognizer one based on image processing technique. The system configuration is described paying attention to 'emotion' as a keyword to communicate between the robot and the human. The proposed system implements non-verbal communication by humorous eye movements from the robot to the human and emotion expression recognition by image processing from the human to the robot, respectively. In this paper, the authors focus on smile as a target of the emotion recognizer. We implemented some smile incitation experiments and their results were discussed.