A robotic head has a key role in exchanging information to indicate its emotional state or communicate during an interaction. Therefore, the main target of this work is to present the open-source and low-cost robot head, known as Two-Ts, which is developed using 3D printing technology and has eight Degrees of Freedom (DOF). Its name represents the union of the initials of the name and surname of its developers, being Tamires and Tanaka, respectively. In addition, its main feature is to reproduce, even with mechanical limitations, the six basic and universal emotions created according to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), such as happiness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and sadness.
The ethics committee of the Federal University of ABC approved the development of the Two-Ts (Certificate of Presentation for Ethical Consideration – CPEC n: 29671020.1.0000.5594).
a) Basic Moviments: Two-Ts’ eyes move left and right in the videos, and the eyebrows move up and down. Furthermore, the head movements are left, right, up, down, a small tilt of the head to left and right, and the partial and complete jaw opening.
- Virtual Two-Ts:
- Real Two-Ts:
b) Emotions: Tamires and Two-Ts perform the emotions of happiness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise, and sadness.
- Tamires:
- Virtual Two-Ts:
- Real Two-Ts:
a) Basic Moviments and Vision Systems:
b) Hearing and Speech Systems:
a) CAD-3D:
- Computer_Tomography.rar: computer tomography images to be imported into the RadiAnt software;
- Skull_Two-Ts.mix: file created in the Autodesk Meshmixer to manipulate the skull meshes to ensure better CAD-3D quality and accuracy;
- Virtual_Two_Ts.f3z: the structural/mechanical design of the A Virtual Two-Ts was developed in Autodesk Fusion 360.
b) Basic Movements and Emotions:
- BasicMovements_Real_TwoTs.py: code used in the experiment that showed the basic movements of the Real Two-Ts;
- Emotions_Real_TwoTs.py: code used in the experiment that showed the emotions of the Real Two-Ts;
- BasicMovements_Emotions_Virtual_TwoTs.py: code used in the simulation that showed the basic moviments and emotions of the Vitual Two-Ts.
c) Google Collaboratory (Colab):
- Colab_Two_Ts.ipynb: a system was implemented to identify the Action Units (AUs) and their intensity in each emotion and compare the results found on the face of Tamires with the Virtual and Real Two-Ts.
- T. dos Santos, W. T. Botelho, E. P. Pimentel and F. S. Yamamoto, "Two-Ts: Development of a Robotic Head to Reproduce Facial Emotions Using 3D Printing Technology". 17th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), Singapore, 2022, pp. 943-948, doi: 10.1109/ICARCV57592.2022.10004240.
This work was supported by a Technical Training Fellowship (TT-3/Process Number: 2019/08079-1) funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)/PIPE Grant Program from June/2019 to May/2020 offered by the Startup NTU Software Technology (Process Number: 2018/04306-0). In addition, Tamires dos Santos received a master’s scholarship funded by Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) from October/2020 to February/2021.