Emotions and Robot Artists: State-of-the-Art and Research Challenges

Emotions play a vital role in communication and mutual understanding between humans. This should also be true for human-robot interaction, but complex emotional robots are just beginning to be developed. This paper presents a personal point of view on emotions and art-making robots, a class of robots which is under-represented in the today’s robot world. State-of-the-art in emotional robotics is critically described, including existing models and theories of emotions. Representative emotional robots are grouped in three categories: robots expressing emotions through body language, robots expressing emotions through art and virtual robots. The paper briefly presents an original cognitive architecture of a system that is able to analyze literary texts, extract the dominant emotion that is expressed in the text and transpose that emotion in a graphical form using a drawing robot. The paper ends presenting examples of emotional synthetic agents in virtual reality environments and future research directions in the presented robotics field.