Development of Intelligent Caring Robots with Interactive Facial Expressions

• Main Authors: En-Chou Lin, 林恩州
• Other Authors: Chung-Hsien Kuo
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/00542130937298350836

碩士 === 長庚大學 === 醫療機電工程研究所 === 95 === This work develops an intelligent caring robot with various facial expressions. This robot is configured with a three-wheeled driving platform, a body and a robot head with two active camera eyes and facial expressions. The three-wheeled driving platform drives the robot moving with any directions and orientations. In addition, the robot head can behave six facial expressions, including smile, anger, sadness, happiness, doubt, and surprise. These facial expressions are mechanically generated by four mechanical modules of active camera eyes, brows, mouse, and neck. These mechanical modules are configured with 9 control degree-of-freedoms and they are controlled by commercial DC servos. Especially, the brows are designed using two typical four-bar-linkages. By introducing various link lengths and control points, different brow motions can be desired using one control degree-of-freedom. In addition, the specially designed neck mechanism use three control degree-of-freedoms to create more special motions such as shrugging robots shoulder. Finally, two control degree-of-freedoms are designed for each camera eye so that it can freely move up and down. In addition, the contour of the robot head is designed as friendly manner. The head is manufactured using the rapid prototyping (RP) machine. On the other hand, a commercial face recognition software is used in this work to recognize caring people. Therefore, the face recognition and facial expression functions make direct interaction with caring people. Finally, all works in this thesis are verified practically, and the results are demonstrated in this thesis. Keywords: intelligent caring robots; interactive robot; innovative mechanism design.