The LMA12-O Framework for Emotional Robot Eye Gestures

The eyes play a significant role in how robots are perceived socially by humans due to the eye’s centrality in human communication. To date there has been no consistent or reliable system for designing and transferring affective emotional eye gestures to anthropomorphized social robots. Combining research findings from Oculesics, Laban Movement Analysis and the Twelve Principles of Animation, this paper discusses the design and evaluation of the prototype LMA12-O framework for the purpose of maximising the emotive communication potential of eye gestures in anthropomorphized social robots. Results of initial user testings evidenced LMA12-O to be effective in designing affective emotional eye gestures in the test robot with important considerations for future iterations of this framework.