具臉部表情功能機器人頭之研製

Design and Development of a Robot Head with Facial Emotion Expression

近年來服務型機器人已漸漸走進人群、社會與家庭中，人與機器人之互動成為重要的研究議題之一，本研究將發展具有與人類一樣可表現臉部表情的機器人頭，所發展之機器人頭，可表達快樂、悲傷、生氣、厭惡、恐懼、驚訝6種基本表情與3 種自訂之表情，機器人頭部主要由臉部控制機構、臉皮支撐架、臉皮與控制系統四個部分所組成，機器人頭臉部控制機構共有16 個自由度，為提升維修效率，採模組化設計，各模組可獨立安裝測試，包含眉毛模組、眼睛模組、嘴部模組及頸部模組，各模組均利用伺服機來控制臉部動作，感測器部分，可透過觸動開關與語音功能與人達成互動，眼珠內可安裝 CMOS 影像感測器，以獲取影像資訊。機器人臉皮部分，採用矽膠材料以公母模壓鑄成型，並經由兩個實驗得到材料受力與應變的線性關係，有助於臉皮之設計與伺服機之選用，發展新的控制點以控制臉皮，臉皮安裝於臉皮支撐架，臉皮支撐架係利用逆向工程及快速原型技術開發。控制系統部份，使用Qwerk RobotController 控制伺服機，利用JAVA語法撰寫程式，達到控制機器人臉部表情之目的。進而增進與人類互動上的真實性與趣味性。

Human-machine interaction has become an important issue for robotapplications. In this paper, we design a robot head which can show ninefacial expressions: surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, anger, andthree cute facial expressions. The robot head consists of a face controlmechanism, a face skin supporter, face skin and a control system.Modulization was adopted to design the mechanism to speed developmentand allow for fast maintenance. An eyebrow module, an eye module, amouth module and a neck module were developed for generating facial expressions.Each module can be easily disassembled and tested independently.Sixteen RC-servos are used to control all mechanisms. Reverseengineering and rapid prototyping were employed to design and develop the robot face skin supporter. The face skin is made of Silicone Gel-10and shaped by mold. Two experiments have been made using SiliconeGel-10 and a linear relationship between strain and force has been obtained.The result helped in designing the face skin and selecting RC-servos forbetter performance. Specially-designed control points were developed tocontrol the face skin. RC-servos activate the control points through plasticwires for facial expressions. The Qwerk Robot controller is used tocontrol RC-servos for human-machine interaction by JAVA script.