An expressive system for endowing robots or animated characters with affective facial displays

This paper describes an expressive system designed to link a model of emotion with socially appropriate expressive behaviors in an intelligent agent or robot. The system was developed to provide an affective interface to Joshua Blue, a computer simulation of an embodied mind that includes emotion and is designed to learn and interact effectively in social environments. The advantages of this implementation include the ability to accommodate different emotion models, to easily specify different expressive behaviors, and to directly inspect, continuously monitor, and intervene to change underlying affective states as they occur. The system currently uses a real-time 3D facial avatar with a simplified anatomical model, but may be readily modified to direct the expressive behaviors of more complex animated characters or robots.