Development of Whole-Body Emotional Expression Humanoid Robot for ADL-Assistive RT Services

Personal robots and Robot Technology (RT)-based assistive devices are expected to play a substantial role in our society largely populated by the elderly; they will play an active role in joint works and community life with humans. In particular, these robots are expected to play an important role in the assistance of the elderly and disabled people during normal Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). To achieve this result, personal robots should better be capable of making emotional expressions like human. In this perspective we developed a whole body bipedal humanoid robot named KOBIAN that is capable of expressing human-like emotions. In this paper we present the development and evaluations of KOBIAN.