Meet FloBi, The Expressive Robot

"There is value in robotics making aesthetics and design a first class citizen," says Andrea Thomaz, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, who wrote about Flobi on her blog. "How the robot looks will directly impact people's perceptions of it, and in turn will impact any studies of interaction done with the platform. The Flobi project demonstrates a couple of interesting ideas with respect to robot design: magnetic features to limit awkward holes on the face, and swappable features to easily change the gender/style."

With research led by Ingo Lutkebohle at Germany’s Bielefeld University work on an expressive humanoid robot head called FloBi that has simple doll-like features to avoid the effects of the uncanny valley.  Slightly larger than an adult human head, FloBi’s modular design allows the researchers to change its perceived gender by snapping together pieces with clips and magnets. The modular parts allows you to insert different sections of the head to create a male or female robot.

The anthropomorphic FloBi's eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, lips, and neck can all move independently to express a selection of emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and fear).  FloBi is equipped with a camera in each eye, microphones, a gyro sensor, and LEDs in its cheeks to simulate a blush response.  It is mainly used to study natural human-robot interaction and the effects of its external appearance.

Now the robot head FloBi has been upgraded with a cheap and simple motion-capture setup.  The result is a robot face that, despite being quite simple and toy-like in appearance, is convincingly lifelike due to its realistic eye movements.  The lips aren’t quite malleable to accurately recreate lip-synching, but given the technical limitations of the robot head, and the simple motion-capture solution they’ve created the result is quite convincing.




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