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Emotion-sensitive robots
« on: 2003-01-09 18:18:51 » |
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This one looks interesting. I have posted the full article on the BBS here:
http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=27585
Sensitive robots taught to gauge human emotion
By R. Colin Johnson
EE Times, January 8, 2003
http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/OEG20030107S0033
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Robotics designers are working with psychologists here at Vanderbilt University to improve human-machine interfaces by teaching robots to sense human emotions. Such "sensitive" robots would change the way they interact with humans based on an evaluation of a person's mood.
"We believe that many of our human-to-human communications are implicit — that is, the more familiar we are with a person, the better we are at understanding them. We want to determine whether a robot can sense a person's mood and change the way it interacts [with the human] for more natural communications," said Vanderbilt assistant professor Nilanjan Sarkar.
"We don't want to give a robot emotions; we just want them to be sensitive to our emotions," added Craig Smith, Vanderbilt associate professor of psychology and human development.
Sarkar, an engineer, initiated the research project with Smith, a psychologist, with the insight that there is no universal method of detecting emotions in humans. This impressed Smith, who had independently noticed that years of research in psychology had failed to uncover the Rosetta stone of human emotions. The bottom line for both researchers was that people express the same emotions in different ways; thus, any "universal" method for detecting emotions with robots would be doomed.
"Psychologists have been trying to identify universal patterns of physiological response since the early 1900s, but without success. We believe that the lesson to be learned there is that there are no such universal patterns," said Smith.
Consequently, the team's research project has two parts: sensing the unique patterns of behavior that mark an individual person's emotions, and converting that information in real-time into actuator-style commands to the robot to facilitate communications between humans and machines.
"We have established the feasibility of the individual-specific approach that we are taking, and there is a good chance that we can succeed," said Smith.
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In the future, the research team wants to be able to discriminate between "bad" anxiety and "good" excitement, since both produce similar physiological profiles. They also plan to map out other psychological states, such as boredom and frustration.
For the latter, Smith has already devised an anagram-based system that can frustrate test subjects by systematically increasing in difficulty. The team is also analyzing different data streams, such as electroencephalogram brain wave monitors and more subtle measures of cardiovascular activity.
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