A design model of emotional body expressions in non-humanoid robots

Abstract

Robotic emotional expressions could benefit social communication between humans and robots, if the cues such expressions contain were to be intelligible to human observers. In this paper, we present a design framework for modelling emotionally expressive robotic movements. The results demonstrate that such expressions can encode basic emotional information, in that the parameters of the proposed design model can convey the meaning of emotional dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance. The framework thus creates a basis for implementing a set of emotional expressions that are appropriately adapted to contexts of human-robot joint activity.

The Perception of Emotion in Artificial Agents

“…Moreover, bodily expressions carry crucial information required for context-dependent emotion recognition (for example [66]). Of course, these same arguments also hold for artificial agents [67], and bodily expressions are especially relevant for robots without dedicated facial articulation (e.g., the robots NAO and Pepper or many nonhumanoid robots). Bodily expressions impact HRI.…”

“…Initial evidence suggests that a participant's focus on different body parts, and assessment of motion (speed and magnitude) influences recognition of emotions displayed by a Robovie-X robot [74]. A careful investigation of these factors was undertaken by Novikova and Watts [67]. They manipulated movement energy (strength and tempo), intensity (suddenness of the movement), duration and frequency in a small toy robot, while participants were asked to rate the perceived valence (from negative to positive), arousal (from low to high), and dominance (from low to high control of the situation).…”

Robot Communication Via Motion: Closing the Underwater Human-Robot Interaction Loop

“…This type of nonverbal communication has also been applied to a dog robot [18] and learned over time by an agent given the feedback of a human [26]. While many of these works focus on the actual display of the emotions and less on how they are generated, Novikova et al [20] models an emotional framework to generate a robot's emotions and then display them, largely through body language.…”

Modeling Human-Robot Collaboration in a Simulated Environment

“…In our experimental study, we used two emotional reactions -surprise and happiness -to enrich a social communication between the robot and human subjects. The reactions consisted of emotional body expressions, designed according to the scheme discussed in [3].…”