Adaptive Emotional Chatting Behavior to Increase the Sociability of Robots

Igor Rodriguez Rodriguez, José María Martínez-Otzeta, Elena Lazkano, Txelo Ruiz-Vazquez

Abstract: Emotion expression is one of the characteristics that make us social beings. It is one of the main forms, along with oral and written language, that gives us a glimpse into the inner mental state of another individual. One of the aims of social robotics is the effortless communication between humans and robots. To achieve this goal, robotic emotional expression is a key ability, as it offers a more natural way to interact in a human-robot environment. In this paper a system to express the emotional content of a spoken text is presented. Head and arms movements, along with eye LED lighting and voice intonation are combined to make a humanoid robot express the sadness-happiness emotion continuum. The robot is able to express the emotional meaning of texts in English, Spanish and Basque languages.