Motion Rendering System for Emotion Expression of Human Form Robots Based on Laban Movement Analysis

A method for adding a target emotion to arbitrary body movements of a human form robot (HFR) is developed. The additional emotion is pleasure, anger, sadness or relaxation. This paper proposes a motion rendering system that modifies arbitrary basic movements of a certain real HFR to add the target emotion at intended strength. The system is developed on the assumption that movements can be emotive by processed on the basis of the correlations between movement features and expressed emotions. The movement features based on Laban movement analysis (LMA) are adopted. An experiment using a real HFR are conducted to test how well our system adds a target emotion to arbitrary movements at intended strength. The results of experiments suggest that our method succeeded in adding a target emotion to arbitrary movements.