A Visual Information-Based Bidirectional Emotion Interaction Interface for Friendly and Empathic Collaborative Robots

Human-robot collaboration in manufacturing is an increasingly important topic in the field of robotics. However, the current collaborative robot's unresolved mechanical and stiff behaviors make its interaction with humans extremely dull, especially for an extended period. Such interaction patterns could further discourage humans from collaborating with these robots. To solve this question, this paper aims to enable collaborative robots' emotional ability in recognizing and responding to human emotions through developing a visual information-based bidirectional emotion interaction (VI-BEI) interface and testing it in manufacturing co-assembly tasks. The developed interaction interface enables the robot to not only recognize human emotions visually but also provide artificial emotion feedback via 3D simulation technology which has flexible and quick prototypes, customization, and upgrading advantages compared to hardware design. Specifically, this paper introduces (1) the development of a 3D digital human interface that not only monitors human facial expressions but also produces artificial emotion feedback. (2) integrating the 3D digital human interface to enable a collaborative robot to express real-time emotions in addition to performing actions during co-assembly tasks, facilitating a friendly collaboration process. (3) validation experiments and analysis to evaluate the effectiveness and performance of the updated collaborative robot with facial expressions through real-world assembly tasks. The experimental results and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of the current system, as well as guide the future improvement of the developed collaborative robots to be more empathic and friendly.