A Robotic Head that Displays Japanese “Manga” Marks

This paper describes the development of a robotic head with ability to display marks commonly used in “manga” (Japanese comics). To communicate with humans, robots should have an expressive facial expression ability for indicating its inner state. Our previous research suggests that, robots can express its emotion clearly if it perform facial expressions that can adapt with the cultural background of the communication partner. As a first step, we focus on making expressions for Japanese people. Manga mark is a unique and famous way of emotion expression in Japanese culture. In a previous preliminary experiment, we determined facial expressions for the robot KOBIAN-R with manga marks. Those expressions included four manga marks as “Cross popping veins” for “Anger”, “Tear mark” for “Sadness”, “Vertical lines” for “Fear” and “Wrinkle” for “Disgust”. A new head that express these marks was developed. Flexible full color LED matrix display and mechanism for indicating black lines were implemented. Experimental evaluation shows that the new robotic head has over 90 % average emotion recognition rates by 30 Japanese participants for each of the six emotions.