Emotional Exchange of a Socially Interactive Robot

This paper presents an emotional exchange framework for a socially interactive robot. The purpose of emotional exchange in social interaction between a robot and people is to make people feel that the robot is a believable living assistant, not a mere machine for information translation. Our emotional exchange framework is composed of the emotion recognition, generation, and expression systems. A user's emotion is recognized by multi-modality such as voice, dialogue, and touch. The robot's emotion is generated according to a psychological theory about cognitive emotions caused by the social interaction within people. Furthermore, the emotion intensity is regulated by the loyalty level of a robot to various users. The generated emotion is dynamically expressed by facial expression, gesture, and the musical sound of the robot. The proposed system, which is composed of all the three components that are necessary for a full emotional interaction cycle, is implemented in the real robot system and tested. The proposed framework can be a cornerstone for the design of emotion interaction and generation systems for robots.