While many social robots already include carefully designed robotic faces, functional robot eyes that meet human expectations are still an open challenge. As a consequence, many robots either have cameras separated from their robot eyes or active camera heads missing an anthropomorphic face. In this paper, we propose a new robot eye that is integrated in the anthropomorphic robot head Floka and fulfills a similar technical specification as a human eye including zero backlash, an increased range of motion, high velocities and accelerations, an integrated high resolution camera, and fast actuated eyelids. The robot eye is built using state-of-the-art off-the-shelf components and the CAD model of our prototype is available free of charge on request for non-commercial applications. We evaluate the technical properties of the robot eye and show that it meets and partially outperforms human eye movements and saccades.

In recent years, an attempt is being made to control robots more intuitive and intelligible by exploiting and integrating anthropomorphic features to boost social human-robot interaction. The design and construction of anthropomorphic robots for this kind of interaction is not the only challenging issue -- smooth and expectation-matching motion control is still an unsolved topic. In this work we present a highly configurable, portable, and open control framework that facilitates anthropomorphic motion generation for humanoid robot heads by enhancing state-of-the-art neck-eye coordination with human-like eyelid saccades and animation. On top of that, the presented framework supports dynamic neck offset angles that allow animation overlays and changes in alignment to the robots communication partner whileretaining visual focus on a given target. In order to demonstrate the universal applicability of the proposed ideas we used this framework to control the Flobi and the iCub robot head, both in simulation and on the physical robot. In order to foster further comparative studies of different robot heads, we will release all software, based on this contribution, under an open-source license.

Even though research on autonomous robots and human-robot interaction accomplished great progress in recent years, and reusable soft- and hardware components are available, many of the reported findings are only hardly reproducible by fellow scientists. Usually, reproducibility is impeded because required information, such as the specification of software versions and their configuration, required data sets, and experiment protocols are not mentioned or referenced in most publications. In order to address these issues, we recently introduced an integrated tool chain and its underlying development process to facilitate reproducibility in robotics. In this contribution we instantiate the complete tool chain in a unique user study in order to assess its applicability and usability. To this end, we chose three different robotic systems from independent institutions and modeled them in our tool chain, including three exemplary experiments. Subsequently, we asked twelve researchers to reproduce one of the formerly unknown systems and the associated experiment. We show that all twelve scientists were able to replicate a formerly unknown robotics experiment using our tool chain.

Simulated environments usually provide the most frequent test environment for robotic systems, often due to their cost and availability advantages. The crucial question is: how precisely must a simulation match the real world in order to produce realistic results? In this demonstration the humanoid robot head Flobi, as well as its simulation, will react to diverse visual stimuli in order to indicate visual attention which is an important cue in social interaction. We directly compare the behavior of the virtual robot, triggered by simulated stimuli, to the physical robot, triggered by real world stimuli. Therefore, we are able to assess and demonstrate the current limitations and advantages of our simulation compared to real world interactions.

A key issue for interactive robots is smooth and natural motion. When robots are tele-operated, e.g. for tele-presence or during “Wizard of Oz” style studies, this requires an intuitive and responsive control interface. Furthermore, this interface should not interfere with perceiving the robot's sensors.

Movable cameras, or robotic eyes, have been of longstanding interest in robotics, but it remains challenging to achieve the various desirable characteristics (such as fast, small, robust, good-looking, etc.) at the same time. We consider robotic eyes targeted at interactive humanoid robots, and present a novel construction that provides human-level accelerations and velocities in a robust way, while its appearance avoids the uncanny valley effect by hiding all mechanics.

A robot's head is important both for directional sensors and, in human-directed robotics, as the single most visible interaction interface. However, designing a robot's head faces contradicting requirements when integrating powerful sensing with social expression. Furher, reactions of the general public show that current head designs often cause negative user reactions and distract from the functional capabilities. Therefore, this contribution presents a novel anthropomorphic robot head called "Flobi", which combines state-of-the-art sensing functionality with an exterior that elicits a sympathetic emotional response. It can display primary and secondary emotions in a human-like way, to enable intuitive human-robot-interaction. To facilitate further research on facial appearance, the exterior is fully modular and replaceable. While current state-of-the-art still requires trade-offs when integrating sensing and social expression, Flobi has been designed to enable service robotic applications, with high-resolution, wide-angle stereo vision, gyroscope motion compensation and stereo audio. For ease of integration, the head is self-contained, including 18 actuators, sensors and control boards, all in a human-head sized package.