Affect bursts to constrain the meaning of the facial expressions of the humanoid robot Zeno

When a robot is used in an intervention for autistic children to learn emotional skills, it is particularly important that the robot's facial expressions of emotion are well recognised. However, recognising what emotion a robot is expressing, based solely on the robot's facial expressions, can be difficult. To improve the recognition rates, we added affect bursts to a set of caricatured and more humanlike facial expressions, using Robokind's R25 Zeno robot. Twenty-eight typically developing children participated in this study. We found no significant difference between the two sets of facial expressions. However, the addition of affect bursts significantly improved the recognition rates of the emotions by helping constrain the meaning of facial expression.

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