(Demos) Smile Like You Mean It: Driving Animatronic Robotic Face with Learned Models (ICRA 2021)

Demo video. To appear at ICRA 2021. The project website is at: ~bchen/aiface/. Full overview video: Hardware description video: Data collection video: Abstract: Ability to generate intelligent and generalizable facial expressions is essential for building human-like social robots. At present, progress in this field is hindered by the fact that each facial expression needs to be programmed by humans. In order to adapt robot behavior in real time to different situations that arise when interacting with human subjects, robots need to be able to train themselves without requiring human labels, as well as make fast action decisions and generalize the acquired knowledge to diverse and new contexts. We addressed this challenge by designing a physical animatronic robotic face with soft skin and by developing a vision-based self-supervised learning framework f