EMOTIONAL SYNCHRONIZATION-BASED HUMAN-ROBOT COMMUNICATION AND ITS EFFECTS

This paper presents a natural and comfortable communication system between human and robot based on synchronization to human emotional state using human facial expression recognition. The system consists of three parts: human emotion recognition, robotic emotion generation, and robotic emotion expression. The robot recognizes human emotion through human facial expressions, and robotic emotion is generated and synchronized with human emotion dynamically using a vector field of dynamics. The robot makes dynamically varying facial expressions to express its own emotions to the human. A communication experiment was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the proposed system. The authors found that subjects became much more comfortable after communicating with the robot with synchronized emotions. Subjects felt somewhat uncomfortable after communicating with the robot with non-synchronized emotions. During emotional synchronization, subjects communicated much more with the robot, and the communication time was double that during non-synchronization. Furthermore, in the case of emotional synchronization, subjects had good impressions of the robot, much better than the impressions in the case of non-synchronization. It was confirmed in this study that emotional synchronization in human-robot communication can be effective in making humans comfortable and makes the robot much more favorable and acceptable to humans.ArticleINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANOID ROBOTICS. 10(1):1350014 (2013)journal articl

Communication skills training intervention based on automated recognition of nonverbal signals

There have been promising studies that show a potential of providing social signal feedback to improve communication skills. However, these studies have primarily focused on unimodal methods of feedback. In addition to this, studies do not assess whether skills are maintained after a given time. With a sample size of 22 this paper investigates whether multimodal social signal feedback is an efective method of improving communication in the context of media interviews. A pre-post experimental evaluation of media skills training intervention is presented which compares standard feedback with augmented feedback based on automated recognition of multimodal social signals. Results revealed signifcantly diferent training efects between the two conditions. However, the initial experiment study failed to show signifcant diferences in human judgement of performance. A 6-month follow-up study revealed human judgement ratings were higher for the experiment group. This study suggests that augmented selective multimodal social signal feedback is an efective method for communication skills training.Defence, Science and Defence Lab; Engineering and Physical Science Research Council

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development