Creating facial motions of Cybernetic Human HRP-4C

HRP-4C is our novel biped humanoid robot whose body shape and face appearance are quite similar to those of female humans. It can make not only various whole body motions including biped locomotion but also various facial motions using eleven axes joints inside the head. This paper focuses on the face of HRP-4C, the mechanical structure of it and the software system for creating its facial motions. To make creation process of the facial motions easy and efficient is one of the important technologies for the practical use of the robot. Our system allows controlling the face of actual robot from the graphical user interface running on a client PC with the high responsiveness. This feature enables a creator to efficiently edit detailed facial motions with powerful functions including overdub loop edit, key pose sequence edit with the lip-sync mode, and automatic blinking. By using this system, we were able to rapidly make facial motions for the demonstrations of HRP-4C.