2A1-L01 Cross-cultural Impression Survey of Japanese "Manga" Marks Based Robotic Facial Expressions(Communication Robot)

This paper describes a cross-cultural impression survey about the robotic facial expressions. For a fluent communication between humans and robots, robots should be able to express emotions with their face. Our previous research shows that robots should express facial expressions that adapt to the cultural background of their partners. First, we developed a robotic head that uses Japanese "Manga" marks in order to adapt to the Japanese cultural background. In this research, we conducted an impression survey of those robotic facial expressions with Japanese and Germans. The result shows that facial expressions are less easy to understand if they are evaluated by the people belong to the other cultural background. This result supports the importance of robots able to adapt their facial expressions according to the cultural background of their partners.