Affective Human-Robotic Interaction

Entertainment robots are becoming commonplace in the home. Users are less fearful of interacting with robotic systems however these interactions are often limited to performing pre-recording sequences of actions. The next generation of consumer-level entertainment robots should offer more natural interfacing and more engaging interaction. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a consumer-level robotic dog with acoustic emotion recognition capabilities. The dog can recognise the emotional state of it's owner from affective cues in the owner's speech and respond with appropriate actions. The evaluation study shows that users can recognise the new robotic dog to be emotionally intelligent and report that this makes the dog appear more `alive'.