Design and Construction of an Animatronic Head Capable of Expressing Emotions and Facilitating Therapy for Children with Autism

The present work details the design and construction of an animatronic head capable of performing facial expressions representing the six basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, and fear), to facilitate the therapy of teaching facial expressions to children with Autism. A set of actuators and mechanisms installed inside the robot gesticulates facial expressions, to show the children the gestures of each emotion. A GUI controls the robot’s movements and presents several activities focused on describing the key points for recognizing basic emotions. A computer vision system performs face tracking and user recognition, after its construction, the animatronic head was evaluated, it can express basic emotions and after a first usage survey, it shows a positive acceptance by users and therapists.