Shreyans Bhansali Undergraduate Dissertation 2016/17

"Animating Zeno", Synchronizing body movements with speech.

Supervised by R.K.Moore

Abstract

Body movements such as gestures, eye movements, posture and facial expressions are a very important aspect of human interaction. In recent years, with the growth of research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), several studies have been focused on studying and implementing body movements with the aim to improve the quality and provide a more authentic experience in HCI. Since humans display the same body movements while expressing an emotion, the main aim of this project will be to develop a system to understand the emotion displayed by speech and synchronize respective body movements in Zeno R25 RoboKind humanoid robot.

The tools available to achieve the aim of the project include Zeno's onboard hardware and bundled software, including a joint animator and a robot simulator as well as a dedicated Java API. Using these tools and implementing an emotion detection system, a total of seven emotions been studied and respective body movements have been generated. However, the implementation of body movements in the robot was constrained by the physical structure and lack of some necessary joints.