Application of the FACS in the Design and Construction of a Mechatronic Head with Realistic Appearance

The growing demand for service robots requires a better and more natural human-machine interaction. Given that an important part of human communication is non-verbal, it is necessary to endow robots with gestural communication capabilities similar to humans. This paper describes the design and construction of a realistic, mechatronic head with high gesture capacity. The proposed design is based on the human anatomy and the facial expressions are defined through the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). The paper shows the implementation details of the mechatronic head and the way a set of servomotors can generate the basic action units of FACS as well as the basic and more complex emotional gestures.