Park, Kyu Min Cheon, Jeongah Yim, Sehyuk 2024-07-11T05:30:12Z 2024-07-11T05:30:12Z 2024-07-11 2024-06 1552-3098 https://pubs.kist.re.kr/handle/201004/150201 Animatronic robots that simulate the lively and realistic motions of creatures can be excellent robotic platforms for social interaction with people. In particular, the robot head is a very important part of expressing various emotions and generating human-friendly and aesthetic impressions. This article presents Ray, a new type of audio-animatronic robot head. All the mechanical structure of the robot is built in one step by 3-D printing and has multiple layers expressing the overall shape of a human head and important features such as eyes, nose, mouth, and chin. This simple, lightweight structure and the separatetendon-based actuation system underneath allow for smooth, fast motions of the robot. We also develop an audio-driven motion generation module that automatically synthesizes natural and rhythmic motions of the head and mouth based on the given audio. The developed robot platform is used for various applications, for example, as a talking robot, robot singer, and robot MC. We expect this research opens up a new paradigm and application possibilities for minimally designed audio-animatronic robots. English Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers A Minimally Designed Audio-Animatronic Robot Article 10.1109/TRO.2024.3410467 1 IEEE Transactions on Robotics, v.40, pp.3181 - 3198 IEEE Transactions on Robotics 40 3181 3198 N scie scopus 001256347100002 2-s2.0-85195363640 Robotics Robotics Article DRIVEN GENERATION SPEECH human-robot interaction (HRI) tendon-driven continuum robot Audio-animatronic robot head audio-driven motion generation