Marcel Heisler
Publication
Facial Mimicry for Android Robots
We are happy to share that our PhD student Marcel Heisler got his recent work on Facial Mimicry for Android Robots accepted at the 20th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The Late Breaking Report was presented in Melbourne, Australia, 4th-6th March 2025.
Abstract
Robots with very human-like faces are expected to be able to display human-like facial expressions. However, manually defining the animations of such facial expressions can be intricate and, thus, methods to automatically animate the actuators of android robot heads are promising. An approach to learn a mapping from human faces to android actuator configurations in a self-supervised way is presented here. Compared to previous approaches, convincing results are achieved with relatively few samples of train data. A capable technology to automatically extract facial expressions from vision input is identified as an important requirement for such approaches. The learned mapping is compared to a manual one in a user study and both are rated mostly positive. In effect, combining both is likely to result in even better mimicry capabilities.
Authors: Marcel Heisler, Christian Becker-Asano
Link to paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3721488.3721677