A mobile virtual character with emotion-aware strategies for human-robot interaction

Abstract

Emotions may play an important role in human-robot interaction, especially with social robots. Although the emotion recognition problem has been massively studied, few research is aimed at investigating interaction strategies produced as response to inferred emotional states. The work described in this paper consists on conceiving and evaluating a dynamic in which, according to the user emotional state inferred through facial expressions analysis, two distinct interaction strategies are associated to a virtual character. An Android app, whose development is in progress, aggregates the user interface and interactive features. We have performed user experiments to evaluate whether the proposed dynamic is effective in producing more natural and empathic interaction.FAPESP (São Paulo State Research Support Foundation) (grant 2014/16862-4