A New Humanoid Architecture for Social Interaction between Human and a Robot Expressing Human-Like Emotions Using an Android Mobile Device as Interface

Abstract

In this paper we illustrate a humanoid robot able to interact socially and naturally with a human by expressing human-like body emotions. The emotional architecture of this robot is based on an emotional conceptual space generated using the paradigm of Latent Semantic Analysis. The robot generates its overall affective behavior (Latent Semantic Behavior) taking into account the visual and phrasal stimuli of human user, the environment and its personality, all encoded in his emotional conceptual space. The robot determines its emotion according by all these parameters that influence and orient the generation of his behavior not predictable from the user. The goal of this approach is to obtain an affinity matching with humans. The robot exhibit a smoothly natural transition in his emotion changes during the interaction with humans taking also into account the previous generated emotions. To validate the system, we implemented the distribute system on an Aldebaran NAO small humanoid robot and on a Android Phone HTC and we tested this social emotional interaction using the phone device as intelligent interface between human and robot in a complex scenario.