Flobi, robotic head, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany

A robot's head is important both for directional
sensors and, in human-directed robotics, as the single most visible interaction interface. However, designing a robot's head faces contradicting requirements when integrating powerful sensing with social expression. Furher, reactions of the general public show that current head designs often cause negative user reactions and distract from the functional capabilities.
Therefore, we present a novel anthropomorphic robot head called "Flobi", which combines state-of-the-art sensing functionality with an exterior that elicits a sympathetic emotional response. It can display primary and secondary emotions in a human-like way, to enable intuitive human-robotinteraction.
To facilitate further research on facial appearance,
the exterior is fully modular and replaceable. While current state-of-the-art still requires trade-offs when integrating sensing and social expression, Flobi has been designed to enable service robotic applications, with highresolution,
wide-angle stereo vision, gyroscope motion compensation
and stereo audio. For ease of integration, the head is selfcontained, including 18 actuators, sensors and control boards, all in a human-head sized package.

Click to expand...

In this video you can see a virtual, fully animated clone
of the Bielefeld Anthropomorphic Robot Head "FloBI".
Human motion is recorded using a custom, cheap & simple
motion capture setup using one helmet face camera and an X-IMU for
the head rotation.

This data is then played back and sent to a server where a virtual
or a physical FloBI robot is connected.
By simulating the motor control loop for the virtual robot we make
sure that the virtual FloBI moves in the same way our real robot would move.

The visualization is caried out in blender, you can choose between offline
rendering (as seen in the video) or live on the fly rendering using the blender
game engine.

Click to expand...