Emotional modeling in an interactive robotic head

Abstract

Social intelligence seems to obviously require emotions. People have emotions, recognize them in others and also express them. A wealth of information is conveyed through facial expressions, voice tone, etc. If robots can recognize and express emotions, the interaction with the user will be improved because the robot will be able to analyze his/her affective state and choose a different action course depending on it. Thus, it seems clear that any attempt to imitate human social abilities should consider modeling emotions or affective states. This chapter describes the emotional model and implementation of CASIMIRO, a prototype social robot built by the authors. CASIMIRO is a complex robot with multimodal capabilities defined by a number of software modules. Examples of user interactions will be also shown that suggest that the model is appropriate for regulating the behavior of the robot.