Data-driven emotional body language generation for social robotics

05/02/2022
by   Mina Marmpena, et al.
20

In social robotics, endowing humanoid robots with the ability to generate bodily expressions of affect can improve human-robot interaction and collaboration, since humans attribute, and perhaps subconsciously anticipate, such traces to perceive an agent as engaging, trustworthy, and socially present. Robotic emotional body language needs to be believable, nuanced and relevant to the context. We implemented a deep learning data-driven framework that learns from a few hand-designed robotic bodily expressions and can generate numerous new ones of similar believability and lifelikeness. The framework uses the Conditional Variational Autoencoder model and a sampling approach based on the geometric properties of the model's latent space to condition the generative process on targeted levels of valence and arousal. The evaluation study found that the anthropomorphism and animacy of the generated expressions are not perceived differently from the hand-designed ones, and the emotional conditioning was adequately differentiable between most levels except the pairs of neutral-positive valence and low-medium arousal. Furthermore, an exploratory analysis of the results reveals a possible impact of the conditioning on the perceived dominance of the robot, as well as on the participants' attention.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
10/14/2020

Affect-Driven Modelling of Robot Personality for Collaborative Human-Robot Interactions

Collaborative interactions require social robots to adapt to the dynamic...
research
04/20/2019

Estimating Emotional Intensity from Body Poses for Human-Robot Interaction

Equipping social and service robots with the ability to perceive human e...
research
05/15/2018

The Socially Invisible Robot: Navigation in the Social World using Robot Entitativity

We present a real-time, data-driven algorithm to enhance the social-invi...
research
08/28/2018

ARBEE: Towards Automated Recognition of Bodily Expression of Emotion In the Wild

Humans are arguably innately prepared to possess the ability to comprehe...
research
12/08/2020

Emotive Response to a Hybrid-Face Robot and Translation to Consumer Social Robots

We introduce the conceptual formulation, design, fabrication, control an...
research
02/25/2020

It's Food Fight! Introducing the Chef's Hat Card Game for Affective-Aware HRI

Emotional expressions and their changes during an interaction affect hea...
research
09/07/2022

ESSYS* Sharing #UC: An Emotion-driven Audiovisual Installation

We present ESSYS* Sharing #UC, an audiovisual installation artwork that ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset