Fuzzy-Head: a mechanic human head robot controlled by a fuzzy inference engine

Fuzzy-Head is a mechanic model of a human head, considering cranial bone, lower jaw, muscles, tendons, connective tissue and skin. The positions and shapes of the lips, the jaw and the cheeks can be changed with the help of model ropes that are connected with a set of four servo-drives. The face mask may be treated as a complex nonlinear system which transforms the vectors of actual servo positions into correlating facial features (expressions). The servo drives are controlled by a complex fuzzy inference engine in order to include existing linguistic knowledge about the articulation process into the control strategy. The fuzzy rules as well as the membership functions are generated or modified by a genetic algorithm