There are currently a number of research teams worldwide working towards the implementation of bionic heads and faces which can attempt to express human emotions, however “… most of them can not express continuous changing expressions effectively, and they just express limited pre-existing emotional state.” explain the developers of a new Chinese Bionic Head.

Lun Xie, Zhiliang Wang, and Jiaming Xu of the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology and the School of Information Engineering, University of Science and Technology, Beijing, present “… a procedure to design and manufacture of the bionic robot head with 13-degree-of-freedom using mechanical designing, three-dimensional mechanical design, artificial intelligence.”
The head, which has a silicone face driven from inside by mechatronic actuators, can reproduce a series of emotional expressions such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.


The strip above shows the head reproducing all the above emotions – the order of which may, or may not, have jumbled up for the purposes of a purely non-scientific amusement – can you tell which is which?

Mechanical Design and Affective Interaction of Bionic Robot Head is published in Advanced Science Letters, Volume 4, Numbers 4-5, April-May 2011 , pp. 1337-1341(5).

If you feel so inclined, you can buy the full paper for just $113.00 plus tax