  Animatronic robots hold the promise of enabling natural human-robot
interaction through lifelike facial expressions. However, generating realistic,
speech-synchronized robot expressions poses significant challenges due to the
complexities of facial biomechanics and the need for responsive motion
synthesis. This paper introduces a novel, skinning-centric approach to drive
animatronic robot facial expressions from speech input. At its core, the
proposed approach employs linear blend skinning (LBS) as a unifying
representation, guiding innovations in both embodiment design and motion
synthesis. LBS informs the actuation topology, facilitates human expression
retargeting, and enables efficient speech-driven facial motion generation. This
approach demonstrates the capability to produce highly realistic facial
expressions on an animatronic face in real-time at over 4000 fps on a single
Nvidia RTX 4090, significantly advancing robots' ability to replicate nuanced
human expressions for natural interaction. To foster further research and
development in this field, the code has been made publicly available at:
\url{https://github.com/library87/OpenRoboExp}.
