Robots and Emotion


Prabhas Chongstitvatana
Chulalongkorn University

Motivation


In the future the number of robots and autonomous agents will be increased.  They will serve more roles in human society.  
To serve human, we need them to perceive our need and we must be able to command robots. To live with robots, robots must be able to adapt their behavior towards different human. To communicate effectively robots should be able to express and perceive emotion.

Methods


A robot that can express and perceive human emotion requires extra elements besides engineering.
 Human emotion has been studied in term of arts and design. One way to have an open-end design is to do "design by evolution." In this sense, Evolutionary Algorithm is used to construct a robotic control system to achieve flexible goals. As a robot situated in human world, it can learn by trial and error, or by inventing and mixing up its stock behaviours to response to a new situation. Perceiving human emotion can be one of stimulus in communication between human and robots. Emotion is useful in everyday life. For example Kaisen engineering uses customers perception to design products.



In my talk I will outline "evolutionary robotics" and "emotional robots." I would like to illustrate examples from my research. The future direction is to use design by evolution coupling with emotion perception to develop a sociable robot.