Mung

Mung

South Korea’s Yonsei University and KAIST have developed an educational robot, which has verified robotic emotional expressions using non-verbal languages. Mung, which has a simple appearance with a body and two eyes, functions as a language purifier by responding to human use of emotional language. It is designed to detect curse and non-curse words and respond to them. The robot recognizes “curse expressions” as harsh grating noises, which are considered obtrusive, and recognized and classified according to how frequently they are included in the body of speech. Responses toward curse words are represented by “bruises” using full color LEDs.

The size of the bruises becomes wider when the number of curse words with the same characteristics increases. The number of bruises increases when the curse words in a different category are perceived. Mung’s bruises slowly disappear whenever the robot recognizes non-curse words. Its whole body returns to its yellow to orange LED color when all the bruises are gone and when a non-speech sound and vibration is produced. According to a survey experiment, emotional expressions through bruises and complexion are one way of effectively delivering a variety of robotic emotions.