The authors have been developing anthropomorphic head-eye robots, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view, and to develop a new head mechanism and function for a humanoid robot having the ability to communicate naturally with a human. We developed an anthropomorphic head-eye robot "WE-3R III" (Waseda Eye No.3 Refined III) having auditory sensation, cutaneous sensation and a facial expression mechanism with eyes, eyelids, eyebrows, lips, a jaw and a neck. It is said that the human cutaneous sensations include contact, pressure, cold, warmth and pain, so a tactile sensor and a temperature sensor were mounted on the robot. For the tactile sensor, we adopted a force sensing resistor. We think that the difference in touching methods such as 'push', 'stroke' and 'hit' have an effect on emotion, therefore we developed the method for recognizing those differences, and installed it in the robot. By improving and rebuilding the artificial psychological model of WE-3RII using a new concept-equations of emotion-in a 3D mental space, we realized expression of the mental state affected by various stimuli with WE-3R III.

In this study the authors have been developing anthropomorphic head-eye robots, in order to elucidate the human vision system from an engineering point of view, and to develop a new human-friendly communication system. We developed an anthropomorphic head-eye robot "WE-3R" (Waseda Eye No.3 Refined) as a human-friendly head-eye subsystem of a humanoid robot "Hadaly-2". WE-3R has eyelids as hardware, while the functions of retina (adaptation) and iris (adjustment of the pupil diameter) are realized as software so WE-3R can adjust to brightness. The system can pursue objects in 3 dimensional space with adjusting to the brightness in a human-like manner that can be considered important for smooth and natural human-robot interaction.