2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Washington State Convention Center
Seattle, Washington, May 26-30, 2015
An Emotion Recognition Comparative Study of Autistic and
Typically-Developing Children using the Zeno Robot
Michelle J. Salvador1 , Sophia Silver2 , and Mohammad H. Mahoor1
Abstract— In this paper we present the results of our recent
study on comparing the emotion expression recognition abilities
of children diagnosed with high functioning Autism (ASD) with
those of typically developing (TD) children through use of a
humanoid robot, Zeno. In our study we investigated the effect
of incorporating gestures to the emotion expression prediction
accuracy of both child groups. Although the idea that ASD
individuals suffer from general emotion recognition deficits is
widely assumed [1], we found no significant impairment in
the general emotion prediction. However, a specific deficit in
correctly identifying Fear was found for children with Autism
when compared to the TD children. Furthermore, we found
that gestures can significantly impact the prediction accuracy
of both ASD and TD children in a negative or positive manner
depending on the specific expression. Thus, the use of gestures
for conveying emotional expressions by a humanoid robot in
a social skill therapy setting is relevant. The methodology and
experimental protocol are presented and additional discussion
of the Zeno R-50 robot used is given.
I. INTRODUCTION
Children with Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience
deficits in verbal and non-verbal communication skills. This
social deficit disorder has lifetime prevalence and can be
extremely damaging to the child if not treated. Although
there is no known cause or cure for Autism, children who
have not received treatment can show signs of regression
to the extent of becoming non-verbal [2]. Therefore, it is
important to treat Autism early on so that social awareness
and communication skills can be learned to help the children
function normally in society later on.
According to the DSM-V ASD, symptoms can look like
any of the following: Deficits in social communication and
social interactions such as social emotional reciprocity or
nonverbal communicative behaviors, among other symptoms.
Although impairment to recognizing emotion cues, such as
facial expressions, is not a diagnostic criterion for Autism,
it is assumed as a common deficit in individuals with ASD
[1] [3]. Nonetheless, emotion reading has been suggested as
a primary difficulty in Autism since a deficit in emotional
expression recognition would prevent the child to sense
others’ emotional states [4] [5] and prevent the child’s social
development.
Since it is recognized that many children with ASD
show a collective interest toward technology and robotics
1 Michelle Salvador (Michelle.Salvador@du.edu) and Mo-
hammad H. Mahoor (Mohammad.Mahoor@du.edu) are with the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Denver,
2390 S. York St. Denver, CO 80210, USA
2 Sophia Silver is with the Department of Psychology,
University of Denver, 2155 S. Race St. Denver, CO 80208, USA
sophsilver94@gmail.com
978-1-4799-6923-4/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE
[6] [7], various Socially Assistive Robots (SAR) have been
specifically developed to target facial expression recognition
improvement in children with ASD. Since there is no general
consensus for what the appearance of a robot dedicated for
Autism therapy should look like, researchers have devel-
oped robots with a wide degree of anthropomorphic realism
and facial complexity with reported success in engaging
children with Autism [8]. Focusing particularly on robots
with emotionally expressive faces, robots with low facial
complexities - such as KASPAR [9] and Tito [10] are
designed so that children are more comfortable and engaged
with the robot. The “anxiety and sensory overload” are
reduced in the first interactions through a simplified face
[6]. In contrast, FACE - developed in collaboration with the
University of Pisa and Hanson Robotics (HR) [11] creates a
highly facially complex robot capable of displaying “nearly-
realistic” human facial expressions [12].
As [1] notes, the idea that ASD individuals suffer from
general emotion recognition deficits is widely assumed and
is further encouraged by publication bias. Therefore studies
such as [12] and [13] that seek using SAR as a way of
teaching social skills to autistic children, may seek to develop
systems that improve overall emotion recognition through
both facial expressions or body language (gestures) because
of this presumed deficit. However, detailed studies [14]
have found that there is little evidence for general emotion
recognition deficits and instead ASD individuals may have
trouble recognizing only a few particular emotions out of
the basic 6 outlined by Paul Ekman [15]. Hence, we rec-
ognize that in order to seek a treatment for improvement in
emotion recognition for children with Autism, the deficiency
in comparison to neuro-typically developing (TD) children
must first be identified if such exists. Furthermore, if this
need for improvement exists then a qualitative measure of
the deficiency should be found for each particular emotion.
By possibly recognizing a measurable difference between TD
and ASD groups’ emotion recognition abilities, a measure of
improvement can be set as the desired outcome of the child
undergoing the SAR therapy treatment.
This paper presents a study testing how children with
Autism can recognize facial expressions illustrated by an
expressive robotic platform, compared to TDs. As suggested
in [1], we hypothesized that a recognition deficit would be
found for children with ASD only for the negative emotions
out of the 6 basic [15], such as anger, fear and disgust when
compared to the TD control group. Neutral is also evaluated.
We hypothesized that no deficit would be found for happy.
Furthermore, we seek to test if the supplementation of facial
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expressions with relevant body gestures can increment the
emotion recognition in TD and children with ASD. Addi-
tionally, this paper also serves as an evaluation of the Zeno
R-50’s capabilities and ability to portray facial expressions;
since the robot’s novelty is primarily its expressive face.
Though [13] has presented a protocol description for a
child-Zeno interaction, implementation and results were not
published. Therefore this pilot experiment also serves as a
first response of the R-50 in an interactive semi-autonomous
ASD child-robot therapy protocol.
This paper is divided into six sections. Section II describes
the Zeno R-50 Specifications in both its hardware and
software capabilities. A discussion of previous works done
with the robot is also found here. Section III defines the
methodology in creating the experiment protocol. The results
and discussion of the experiment are presented in Section IV
and V respectively. Finally, Section VI concludes this paper.
Future work is also examined in this section.
II. E XPRESSIVE ROBOTIC P LATFORM : Z ENO R-50
A. Use in Previous Work
In 2012, HR commercially released the Zeno R-50 to
provide a more realistic robot than other facially expressive
robots such as KASPAR, but less realistic than FACE [11].
To do this, HR created Zeno with a simplified 11 DOF face
and neck system, but used the same porous silicon material
(Frubber). By using such Frubber material, the robot’s facial
skin closely resembles human tissue in its physical properties
and can achieve a more realistic mechanical actuation parallel
to human muscle movement [16].
Initial proof-of-concept studies with Zeno conducted by
HR showed that 9 out of 10 mid-functioning children with
ASD (ages nine and ten) responded positively to Zeno in an
applied behavior analysis (ABA) labeling task. These results
suggest that Zeno can be used as a promising platform for
ASD research as the robot was positively accepted and en-
gaging for the participants [11]. However, these experiments
conducted by HR mainly tested the acceptance levels of the
children and did not use the robot’s facial expressive capacity
to engage the children in emotion recognition related tasks.
Few studies have been conducted so far exploiting Zeno’s
facial expressivity capabilities since Zeno R-50 is a newly
commercially available platform. However, one such study
making use of the robot’s facial capacities is the ZECA
project [13]. In searching for a robot platform which to base
their proposed Emotion Recognition protocol they selected
the Zeno R-50 model for its cartoonish yet expressive face.
However, the protocol designed only plans to include chil-
dren with ASD for comparing those who will versus those
who will not use the robot in the experiments. The protocol
does not seek a way of measuring the assumed facial emotion
deficit as compared to typically developing children [13].
B. Zeno R-50 Hardware
Developed by Hanson Robotics, Zeno is a child-sized
robot (0.635 meter max height, 6.5 Kg weight) with a
simplified expressive face [17]. The robot’s face contains a
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total of eight DOF, three DOF for the neck, and 25 DOF for
the body.
The body uses a combination of Dynamixel RX-64 and
RX-28 servos. RX-64s are used on the legs, hips and shoul-
ders, and RX-28 servos for the waist. Using a combination
of 3 Cirrus CS-101 STD 4g Micro Servos and 5 Hitec
HS-65MG [18] the motors simulate facial expressions by
actuating the Frubber facial skin. Additionally the R-50 robot
is equipped with an HD camera in each motorized eye and
two microphones. A 9-axis inertial measurement unit is also
available along with bump sensors in each foot among other
available sensors. Provided in the R-50 model, is a Linux
onboard computer with a 1 GHz Vortex 86DX x86 CPU
processor with Wi-Fi and Ethernet connections [17]. Figure
1 shows the Zeno R-50 robot used in this experiment seated
in the study area as a participant would interact with it.
Fig. 1. Left) Zeno R-50 Robot in study area. Top Right) Example images
from the Tilburg University emotion image set. Bottom Right) Example
face gestures used in the study (from left to right) HappyT1F, SadT1F, and
AngryT1F
C. Motion Controlling and Developed Software
Provided with Zeno R-50, the RoboWorkshop software
allows editing and creation of Zeno .xml animation files
containing servomotor position information. Automatic lip-
syncing text-to-speech software is also provided. However
no software, similar to Aldebaran’s Choregraphe [19], is
available to program Zeno to perform complex behaviors.
Nonetheless, HR has made RoboKind API available with
extensive Java libraries to communicate with Zeno. Using the
available RoboKind API and NetBeans IDE, we developed
a GUI controller, ZenoBrain, for real-time control of the
Zeno’s control behavior sequences. ZenoBrain was thus
developed to allow a mixture of autonomy in Zeno’s behavior
and Wizard-of-Oz Interaction for manual operation as needed
in the protocol.
III. M ETHODS
A. Development of Robot Emotion Animations
We modeled and implemented the six basic + neutral
emotions on Zeno’s face and saved them as animations for
play back during the experimental sessions. Although Zeno
lacks many facial action units (AU) found on the human
face, each emotion was modeled using the available AUs as
described by Paul Ekman [15]. Table 1 shows the available
AUs used for each emotion and what motor name that
motor corresponds to in the RoboWorkshop animation editor.
Particularly for Disgust, since AU 9 (Nose Wrinkler) is listed
by EMFACS user manual as necessary, auxiliary AU 25 (lip
part) and AU 7 (lids tight) were used. To attempt to simulate
AU 9, the eye brows on the robot were slightly lowered to
simulate wrinkling of the upper skin over the nose.
TABLE I
AVAILABLE AU S IN THE ROBOT FACE USED FOR E MOTION A NIMATIONS .
Emotion Animation AUs Used Motor Name
Happy AU12 Smile Left/ Right
Suprise AU1, AU5, AU26 Brow Pitch, Eyelids, Jaw
Sadness AU1, AU15 Brow Pitch, Smile Left/Right
Anger AU4, AU5, AU25 Brow Pitch, Eyelids, Jaw
Disgust AU7, AU9, AU25 Eyelids, Brow Pitch, Jaw
Fear AU1, AU5, AU26 Brow Pitch, Eyelids, Jaw
Furthermore, three separate animations were created for
each emotion with AU intensity as the variant. The anima-
tions were labeled accordingly to distinguish the intensities.
For example: HappyTF1, HappyT2F, and HappyT3F. Cor-
respondingly, the intensity for each animation was approxi-
mately 30%, 60%, and 100% of the maximum motor range
allowed by Zeno’s internal software in all the motors used
to animate that expression.
In addition to facial activation animations, another se-
quence of animations was designed to include body gesture
posing. As noted by [20] it is generally unknown which
specific gestures are needed to express the emotions since
humans can use many different body poses to express the
same emotion. Therefore, we chose to model the robot’s body
gesture poses after images found in the Tilburg University
emotion image set [22]. The set was produced from 50 actors
asked to display each of the six basic emotions. Of the
image set, 18 images were chosen at random, three from each
different emotion. The matching between facial intensity and
gestures were combined at random.
The lower body was not incorporated into Zeno’s body
gesture animations since we have not developed software for
Zeno’s lower body kinematics at the moment. Nonetheless,
the animations based on these images were developed to
closely mimic the expressions of the actors’ facial and upper
body expressions with the available degrees of freedom.
In total 37 animations were produced. Nineteen of these
consisted of only AU-based facial expressions, including
a neutral expression. The other 18 animations were each
based on the gesture mimicry of 18 human actors. The time
dynamic for all the animations was designed with a 0.5
second linear ramp from neutral to the emotion’s full motor
activation, a one second hold of pose, and a 0.5 second
linear ramp decline back to neutral. This was chosen for
its simplicity and to give sufficient time for the motors to
reach their full trajectories.
B. Experiment Protocol Stages
Our study was conducted at the University of Denver
where an IRB approval was obtained and all the children’s
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parents signed a consent form. The protocol consisted of
eight stages each lasting a maximum of three minutes to
maintain the interest level of the child. The experiment is
presented to the child as a series of games where the child
should predict/guess what emotion the robot is trying to
show. Figure 2 shows the room setup used in the experiment.
• Stage 1: Introduction of Zeno to Child
The first stage of the protocol involved a visual
introduction of Zeno to the child and an explanation
of the rules of the game. To aid in playing the game,
they were given a set of seven plain laminated cards
each containing one of the emotion labels (“happy”,
“sad”, “neutral” etc.). If the child felt comfortable,
the child was then left in the room alone with the robot.
• Stage 2: Child-Zeno Verbal Interaction
The purpose of this stage is to further allow the
child to become comfortable with the robot through
prompting a simple conversation. While the Child-Zeno
conversation occurred the microphone located inside
the room allowed the manual operator, assistant, and
parent to listen. Depending on the responses given
by the child the manual operator is able to type in a
response for Zeno to speak or perform from a library
of pre-created animations.
• Stage 3, 5, and 7: Emotion Recognition Game
In these stages, the main experiment game was carried
out. For each game stage, a sequence of 13 emotions
was randomly shown by Zeno. After showing each
emotion, Zeno would resume a neutral pose and wait
for the child’s response. When the child was ready to
make a guess, they verbally told Zeno what emotion
they thought the robot was displaying. From listening
through the audio speakers, the manual operator
recorded the response as true or false. The manual
operator took note of what emotion the child thought
Zeno was showing if the child’s guess was incorrect
from Zeno’s meant emotion. At the child’s request, the
animation was repeated by Zeno if necessary. At times
when the child was indecisive about their guess, the
initial guess would be taken as the official guess.
• Stage 4 and 6: Child-Zeno Interaction and Break
These stages provided needed breaks from the emotion
recognition game to preserve the interest of the child
in later game stages. Also, the child could chose to
dance with Zeno as an entertaining joint activity.
• Stage 8: Zeno End Conversation
After the final emotion recognition game is played
Zeno provides a simple closing farewell and thanks the
child for playing with “him”.
 general combination of all 7 emotions, there is no statistical
difference between the groups, t(21)=0.27, p>.05.

Fig. 2. Room setup of experiment protocol

C. Description of Children Participants

Twenty-three children were recruited for the study. Of
these, 22 children between the ages of 7-13 (Age M=9.0)
completed the experiment. Eleven were classified as high Fig. 3. The average group accuracy percentage is shown for both ASD and
TD groups. Each bar represents the average of the group for that specific
functioning autistic by medical diagnosis (Age M=9.1, emotion of the ASD and TD study participants. Error bars are of +/- 1 SE.
SD=1.29) (Female=2, Male=9) and 11 as neuro-typical chil-
dren (Age M=8.8, SD=1.89) (Female=5, Male=6). Although
the gender distribution of these two groups differed, we
found this distribution to be reflective of the US population
statistics for each [21] [23].
In accepting participants, we ensured that the children in
our ASD group had a formal diagnosis from a doctor or
psychologist. The parents or guardians of the children were
also asked whether the child was at least about 80% verbal
and had the ability to read simple words. Individuals with
low functioning Autism were excluded from this study as
it required participants to sit in the room for three minutes
with the robot to complete each task.
As a control group, researchers recruited neuro-typical
functioning children who have never been diagnosed with
any kind of developmental or social deficit disorder. Addi- Fig. 4. The group accuracy for when only the face is used or when gestures
were incorporated is shown. For example, “ASD face” bars are the average
tionally, children who have siblings and or have been exposed ASD group percentage accuracy for when only facial expressions were used
to ASD in their homes were excluded from the study to by the robot to show an emotion. Error bars are of +/- 1 SE.
ensure a separation between the TD control group and ASD
Comparing the ASD group’s predictions of when the robot
individuals.
showed only a facial expression versus gesture expression,
the overall average accuracy dropped with the addition of
IV. RESULTS
gestures as also shown in Figure 3. Particularly Angry
Overall, the ASD group of children in our study achieved a showed that the addition of gestures significantly lowered
slightly higher accuracy average than the TD group for recog- the ASD group’s ability to recognize the emotion, (Face
nizing the emotions the robot was meant to convey (ASD av- ASD M=57.6, SD=28.8) (Gest ASD M =33.3%, SD=28.4%),
erage prediction accuracy percentage M=55.7, SD=12.2) (TD t(10) = 1.72, p<0.05. When adding gestures the ASD group
average prediction accuracy percentage M=54.5, SD=6.2) choose Disgust more frequently when Angry was shown by
(For the remainder of this paper the average prediction accu- the robot.
racy percentage of the correct predictions for the condition In contrast, Disgust (Face ASD M=24.2, SD=20.5) (Gest
will be reported in the parentheses). See Figure 3. However, ASD M=60.6, SD=31.2) and Fear (Face ASD M=24.2, SD)
when the general results are broken down into the predictions (Gest ASD M=36.3 SD=36.1) both showed a prediction
where the robot provided only the facial expression (ASD improvement for children with ASD when adding gestures.
M=56.8%, SD=15.2%) (TD M=54.9%, SD=10.2%) and the However, only Disgust showed a significant difference in
predictions where the robot used gestures in the expression the addition of gestures, t(10)=1.74 p<0.01. Performing
(ASD M=49.0%, SD=11.9%) (TD M=54.0%, SD=8.6%), the the same comparison for each emotion in the TD group,
TD group outperformed the ASD group when gestures were most emotion predictions also dropped in accuracy with the
added, Figure 4. In observing the ability of TD versus ASD addition of gestures. The exceptions to this drop were once
to correctly predict the robot’s emotional expression as a again Disgust (Face TD M=18.2, SD=21.9) (Gest TD M

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Fig. 5. Shown is the confusion matrix for the recognition of six basic
+ neutral emotions by the children diagnosed with ASD. Columns are the
emotion meant to be shown while rows are the emotion selected by ASD
participants.
Fig. 6. This confusion matrix shows the TD children’s recognition of basic
emotions. Columns are the emotion meant to be shown while rows are the
emotion selected by ASD participants.
= 36.4, SD=33.2) and Fear (Face TD = 12.1, SD=16.03)
(Gest TD = 66.7, SD=24.6) with Fear showing a strong
improvement, t(10)=1.74, p<0.001. Also, Surprise did not
show any change with the addition of gestures for the TD
individuals (Face TD M=75.8, SD=32.1) (Gest TD M=75.8,
SD=24.6).
For both ASD and TD groups, Happy showed a substantial
decrease in accuracy with the incorporation of gestures
[(Face ASD M=90.9) (Gest ASD M=63.6), t(10) =2.58,
p<0.01)] [(Face TD M=84.9)(Gest TD M=45.4) t(10)=3.17,
p<0.01)]. For both groups the confusion of Surprise for the
shown Happy expression incremented. Although no other
emotions showed a substantial difference between the TD
or ASD group’s ability to recognize emotions, Fear showed
a strong significant difference between the TD and ASD
groups when gestures were added (Gest ASD M=36.4,
SD=36.1)(Gest TD M=66.7 ,SD=24.6) , t(20)=-2.19, p<0.01.
Neutral is not taken into account in these cases as there was
no added gesture to the facial expression.
V. DISCUSSION
In our study we did not find a general significant impair-
ment in the ASD group for recognizing emotions. However,
the addition or absence of gestures did produce a substan-
tial difference between the two group’s interpretations of
particular emotions. Although incorporating gestures slightly
reduced the accuracy of both study groups’ guesses, addition
of gestures for Happy greatly lowered the guess accuracy in
both groups. In the [22] image data set used to model Zeno’s
gestures, the human actors used for creating the set were
asked to display their expression by associating a scenario
to the emotion they were interpreting; “encountering an old
friend not seen in years and being very pleased to see” [22].
Thus the actors may have mixed Happy and Surprise in their
gestures by pretending to meet their unexpected friend.
In contrast, the addition of gestures for Disgust signifi-
cantly improved the ability of the children with ASD to rec-
6132
ognize the emotion. Since the robot lacks the ability to show
AU 9 (Nose Wrinkler), it is understandable why Disgust had
a low recognition rate for face expression. Nonetheless, with
gestures the accuracy increased from 24% to a 61% accuracy.
In contrast, in a study conducted by [25] using the same
image set as used by our study, they reported a 76% accuracy
by normal adults for Disgust. Considering that the emotion
was displayed by a simplified Humanoid robot, the increase
in accuracy of Disgust by supplementing emotion expression
with gestures shows great significance for the ASD group.
We note that the expression of Disgust would have improved
with giving the robot the ability to open its hands as if
pushing something away to mimic the human actors’ hand
gestures. Similarly, the TD group was able to greatly benefit
from the incorporation of gestures for Fear by incrementing
from a 12% to a 66% accuracy. Although, the ASD group
slightly improved with the addition of gestures for Fear,
the increment is not comparable to that found by the TD
group. Hence, the only significant impairment that we found
in children with ASD when compared to TD children was
the ability to recognize Fear when gesture expressions are
both used. These findings are in concordance with [1], where
data of over 980 Autistic participants from 48 papers were
compiled, fear was the only emotion where ASD individuals
showed marginal significant deficiencies.
Concerning the implementation of the experimental pro-
tocol, varied initial reactions were elicited by Zeno from the
children in our study. All TD children showed an acceptance
towards the robot when first being introduced to Zeno. In
contrast 3 out of 12 children with ASD showed a strong
aversion. Of these, one refused to enter the room with Zeno,
stating a dislike for its human like face. The other two
participants showed fear towards the robot. However when
told that their parent could join them in the room, they agreed
to participate in the study. In such cases the parents were
present in the study room but were instructed not to give
any verbal or nonverbal cues to their child about the emotion
being asked by the robot. Nonetheless, the other children
with ASD showed a strong curiosity of the robot, particularly
its face. Sixteen of 22 participants who completed the study
agreed to dance with the robot.
VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS
This paper presented a comparative study testing how
children diagnosed with ASD vs TD children can recognize
emotion expressions as shown by a humanoid robot. We
also studied the effect of using body gestures by the robot
on the expression recognition predictions of children. In
a group of 22 participants, we found that there was no
significant impairment in the ASD group when compared to
TD children for recognizing the basic emotion expressions
on average. However, a strong impairment for the ASD
group in recognizing Fear was found when gestures were
added versus the TD control group. Additional analysis of
the results comparing use of only facial vs incorporation
of gestures showed significant reduction of the average
prediction accuracy for Happy in both groups. Conversely,
a significant improvement was shown for Disgust in the
ASD group but not TD when gestures were added. Also, a
significant improvement was shown in Fear recognition for
the TD group but not the ASD. The improvement difference
was so dramatic that this proved to be the only deficit
significantly differentiating the ASD vs TD groups. Through
these findings we demonstrated that a general impairment in
expression recognition for children diagnosed with Autism
should not be assumed when designing SAR therapies for
them. Instead, each emotion should be evaluated individually.
These results using a humanoid robot therefore support the
findings of several psychology papers such those compiled
by [1] and [26] that have shown that individuals with ASD
are successful in matching emotion expressions in still im-
ages overall. Furthermore, we showed that the use of gestures
can significantly impact the prediction accuracy of both ASD
and TD children in a negative or positive manner depend-
ing on the emotion. Also we demonstrated the successful
capability of the Zeno R-50 to convey all six basic emotion
expressions when using a combination of facial and body
gestures. Although the children diagnosed with Autism did
not show any significant impairment for correctly labeling
most expressions, future work should investigate whether the
children can truly identify the emotional meaning connected
to the label and visual cue. To test this, for example the
child can be asked to make up a short story explaining
why the robot may be showing such emotion expression. As
this may prove difficult for some children to do, the use of
electro dermal activity to identify if the child associates the
expression with an emotion can also be explored. Through
this work, we seek to contribute to the SAR and Autism
research community for development of improved and more
targeted therapies for social emotion skill development.
VII. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This research is partially supported by grant IIS-1450933
from the National Science Foundation.
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