A Soft-Skin Facial Robot Capable of Real-Time Emotion-Driven Actuation Through Visual Perception
摘要
Existing facial robotic systems often suffer from high costs, limited flexibility in expression imitation, and a lack of adaptability to diverse facial identities, resulting in suboptimal replication of human-like expressions. This work designs YU-F01, a low-cost soft-skin facial robot capable of real-time emotion-driven actuation through visual perception. The system integrates computer vision and a multi-actuator facial mechanism to enable dynamic expression imitation. The main innovations include: (1) a landmark-based hierarchical mapping framework that converts facial keypoints into coordinated servo movements, allowing for adaptive expression replication across different facial structures; (2) a Polling-based Multi-actuator Synchronous Control Framework (PMSCF) that enables pseudo-parallel control of 16 servos on a microcontroller, reducing flash and memory usage by 21% and 44%, respectively, compared to RTOS solutions; (3) a Bio-inspired mechanical design featuring E600# silicone skin (Shore 0 ± 2 hardness) and an optimized linkage system, capable of simulating 12 key Facial Action Coding System (FACS) action units, all of which cost less than 70 dollars for the robot. Experimental results show that the robot can accurately capture expressions across multiple models, and its expression imitation achieves a PCC of 89.7%, demonstrating strong expression replication capability.