Expression of Emotions through Body Motion - A Novel Interface for Human-Robot Interaction

An approach is presented for the expression of basic emotions through only the agent body pose and velocity. The approach is applied in human-robot interaction scenarios, where both humans and robots communicate only through their relative position and velocities. As a result, an interface for human-robot interaction is obtained, which does not require the use of haptic devices or explicit communication with humans, verbal for instance. The small set of emotions that can be conveyed enable humans and robots to anticipate the intentions of the opponent and adapt their behavior accordingly. The aproach is implemented using a webcam, simple vision processing algorithms and Hidden Markov models. The results of preliminary experiments are