2018 Volume 30 Issue 5 Pages 682-690
In recent years the personal robots for the purpose of contacting with human such as the entertainment robot and nursing care robot have been increasing. By this reason, the ability to transfer some informations in the communication to human has become necessary for these robots. As the medium to communicate smoothly, it is used a lot of non-verbal (non-language) communication like facial expressions and gestures.
In this research, by focusing on the body motion, we have proposed an interactive emotion communication (IEC) as a method which robot and human attempt to transfer information by the body motion with emotion. We aim to perform interactive communication by the body motion with emotion to increase the interpersonal affinity to the robot by amplifying and suppressing the human emotion. In the previous research, it has been found it is necessary to have not only sympathetic but also not bored emotional behavior response model to enhance interpersonal affinity.
A method for the emotion generation using Markovian emotional model is proposed in this paper. Using the Markovian emotional model is capable of modeling the state transition that takes into account the emotional preference reactions and the internal state of recognized emotion. In this research, an emotion generation model with the interaction sustained human interest is constructed. Performing the interaction experiment by the robot equipped with this model, we confirmed that the interpersonal affinity is improved in a humanoid robot with Markovian emotional model.
