Robots that Listen to People's Hearts

Abstract

As robots begin to integrate our world and invade our streets and homes, they must act as autonomous and intelligent beings. However, so far, they are deprived of our responsive and emotional capacities, lacking awareness of the social world we live in. In the future, robots should be able to take into account these distinctive dimensions of human social interactions to be able to act appropriately within such social contexts. To do this, they must adapt and embody the essence of social and emotional intelligence. This not only includes the ability to recognise human emotions and social interactions but also understand them, deliberate them and act accordingly. Lately, significant research has been carried out in an attempt to find ways to build social and emotional robots that are able to perceive the user's emotions, adapt to them, and react appropriately. This talk will, therefore, provide an overview of the area of emotions in social interactions established between humans and social robots. In this analysis, I will use scenarios from educational and entertainment robotics, outline the process of building emotional social robots and finally proceed to interpret the effect that such capabilities have on user's interactions, learning, motivation, relationship and trust. I believe that by studying and engineering emotional and social interactions for and with robots, we have the opportunity to build a new generation of natural, engaging, effective and, most importantly, humane AI.