David G. Cooper

David G. Cooper
Emotional Robotics


Abstract

Emotional communication skills are dominant in biological systems. Despite the apparent complexity of creating and broadcasting emotional cues, the expression is concise, making them effective and advantageous for multi-agent environments where communication bandwidth is limited and in high demand. However, social robots run the risk of being deceived and used by an opponent using friendly emotional cues. To study this security glitch, we present an interactive environment in which a person can learn the robot's emotional responses through interaction. We then present Tug of War, a game where two people compete for the heart of one robot. The system described is a potential test bed for human-robot interaction, both for engineers, and clinical psychologists.

Paper: pdf [531KB]

Presentation: pdf [1.5MB]

Movies:

An example of the robot interacting with a person. The main screen is the
view of the robot by the person. The upper right hand view is the robot's
view of the person. (The red square is the location of the detected face.)
The upper left hand view is the input factors affecting the robot's emotional
state: mov Slide 2 [5MB]

An example of the 4 conditions of Facial Expression: mov Slide 11 [1.5MB]

Preliminary Work: wmv [80.2MB]