I-Corps: Commercialization feasibility research of animation-projection ExpressionBots

I-Corps：动画投影ExpressionBots商业化可行性研究

• 批准号: 1449747
• 负责人: Mohammad Mahoor
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: University of Denver
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-07-01 至 2015-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1449747&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Corps; Commercialization; feasibility; research; animation

Existing robotic platforms in the market have serious limitations for natural face-to-face communication. An alternative approach that could overcome many of these problems is to use state-of-the-art character animation technologies to project lifelike 3-D models onto a robotic mask that can display the 3-D models? natural speech and facial expressions. Currently, there are no such animation-based human robotic agents available in the market that can be acquired, nor can such capabilities be assembled from plug-and-play mechatronic components without significant design work and customization. In this proposal the team has developed a robotic head that projects an animation on a translucent custom designed facial mask to mimic emotive facial gestures and visual speech.The proposed product (ExpressionBot) is an extremely low-cost and portable robotic head using animation-projection and a custom designed facial mask that can display rich emotive facial gestures and visual speech generated by an avatar agent. The agent can speak, produce and mirror facial expressions synchronized with agent?s visual and prosodic speech. The ExpressionBot can be used as science tutor in classrooms, companionbots in nursing homes, museums tour guide, hotels receptionists, and tourist information kiosks. The ExpressionBot1 comprises a rich Physical Display Portal complete with software libraries for robotic character instantiation including facial expression generation and visual speech generation, human facial recognition, human speech recognition and natural language processing, and world environment recognition.

市场上现有的机器人平台对于自然的面对面交流有严重的限制。另一种可以克服这些问题的方法是使用最先进的角色动画技术，将逼真的3D模型投影到可以显示3D模型的机器人面具上。自然的语言和面部表情。目前，市场上还没有这种基于动画的人类机器人代理，也不能在没有大量设计工作和定制的情况下从即插即用的机电组件组装这种能力。 在这项提案中，该团队开发了一种机器人头部，该头部在半透明的定制设计的面具上投射动画，以模仿情感面部姿态和视觉语音。拟议的产品（ExpressionBot）是一种极低成本和便携式的机器人头部，使用动画投影和定制设计的面具，可以显示丰富的情感面部姿态和视觉语音，由化身代理生成。智能体可以说话，产生和镜像与智能体同步的面部表情？的视觉和韵律语言。ExpressionBot可用作教室中的科学导师，疗养院中的陪伴机器人，博物馆导游，酒店接待员和旅游信息亭。ExpressionBot1包括一个丰富的物理显示门户，配有用于机器人角色实例化的软件库，包括面部表情生成和视觉语音生成、人类面部识别、人类语音识别和自然语言处理以及世界环境识别。