Abstract
Abstract This article explores the rapidly advancing innovation to endow robots with social intelligence capabilities in the form of multilingual and multimodal emotion recognition, and emotion-aware decision-making capabilities, for contextually appropriate robot behaviours and cooperative social human–robot interaction for the healthcare domain. The objective is to enable robots to become trustworthy and versatile social robots capable of having human-friendly and human assistive interactions, utilised to better assist human users’ needs by enabling the robot to sense, adapt, and respond appropriately to their requirements while taking into consideration their wider affective, motivational states, and behaviour. We propose an innovative approach to the difficult research challenge of endowing robots with social intelligence capabilities for human assistive interactions, going beyond the conventional robotic sense-think-act loop. We propose an architecture that addresses a wide range of social cooperation skills and features required for real human–robot social interaction, which includes language and vision analysis, dynamic emotional analysis (long-term affect and mood), semantic mapping to improve the robot’s knowledge of the local context, situational knowledge representation, and emotion-aware decision-making. Fundamental to this architecture is a normative ethical and social framework adapted to the specific challenges of robots engaging with caregivers and care-receivers.
Highlights
One of the very distinct human intelligence abilities that distinguish us from machines is our ability to gauge, sense, and appropriately respond to emotions
We propose leveraging technologies and techniques from the fields of Affective Computing [8], Natural Language Processing (NLP) [9], Computer Vision (CV) [10], and Complex Decision-Making in HRI [11,12] to develop an “emotionaware architecture” called Computing Affect and Social IntelligencE
In light of the pandemic, the robotics community issued a call to action for new robotic solutions for public health and infectious disease management, with a particular emphasis on increased adoption of social robots [31], as quarantine orders have resulted in prolonged isolation of individuals from social interaction, which may have a detrimental effect on their mental health
Summary
One of the very distinct human intelligence abilities that distinguish us from machines is our ability to gauge, sense, and appropriately respond to emotions. Ever increasing advances in AI and hardware technology are enabling machines to extract emotion from our verbal and non-verbal communication Despite these advancements, there has been a narrow adoption of “emotionaware technology” in social robotic applications due to the many scientific and technical hurdles involved. To enable meaningful and trustworthy social interaction with social agents, a person needs to perceive their dialogue partner as an autonomous entity, requiring both a physical presence and the possibility to directly interact and emote appropriately. This propensity to anthropomorphise increases meaningful social interaction between robots and people [7] and helps interactive assistive technologies succeed. By allowing the robot to manage the complexities associated with real-world human interactions, “CASIE robots” can facilitate the adoption of assistive healthcare robotic applications
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