Mapping a human face onto a small robot (instead of giving it an uncanny humanoid face)?

Robotics engineer from HuggingFace/PollenRobotics here. I've never been fully comfortable with robot faces that try too hard to look human, the uncanny valley is real and I think it's the wrong design direction for robots. I'm trying something different: leave the robot its own non-human face, and use a human face purely as a controller to make it expressive on its terms! Step 1 is making this better. Step 2 is flipping it around: use this human → robot mapping to generate