Modelling empathic behaviour in a robotic game companion for children

Abstract

The idea of autonomous social robots capable of assisting us in our daily lives is becoming more real every day. However, there are still many open issues regarding the social capabilities that those robots should have in order to make daily interactions with humans more natural. For example, the role of affective interactions is still unclear. This paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in an elementary school where 40 children interacted with a social robot capable of recognising and responding empathically to some of the children's affective states. The findings suggest that the robot's empathic behaviour affected positively how children perceived the robot. However, the empathic behaviours should be selected carefully, under the risk of having the opposite effect. The target application scenario and the particular preferences of children seem to influence the "degree of empathy" that social robots should be endowed with.

Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users

“…For example, emotional pose recognition with the Nao robot is consistent (Beck, Canamero, & Bard, 2010), facilitating the use of emotional expression as a feedback channel that can be employed by the robot. Following from this general competence, it has been shown that an empathic or supportive robot is prefered to a non-affective agent by children, and that its use can possibly lead to increased performance, in both teaching scenarios (Saerbeck, Schut, Bartneck, & Janse, 2010), and peer-peer interactions (Leite, Castellano, Pereira, Martinho, & Paiva, 2012). Thus, what we see is that there are a range of physical and behavioural competencies, typically inspired directly by human behaviour, that are employed to make robot behaviour more naturalistic within a child-robot interaction context.…”

Mood contagion of robot body language in human robot interaction

“…A preliminary evaluation also suggested that the emotional behavior of the robot improved children's perception of the game. In another study [33], this robot responded empathically to children's affective states. Results suggest that the robot's empathic behaviors enhance children's attitude towards the robot.…”

ICTs for Assessment and Intervention on Cultivation of Empathy

“…The empathic model includes an a!ect detector that allows the robot to infer the valence of the feeling experienced by the children. The a!ect detector, based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs), processes in real-time behavioural and contextual features, providing as output a probability value for each of the following valence conditions: positive, neutral and negative [39].…”