Affective robotics

Abstract

Affective robotics consists in enhancing the interaction of a human with a robot by recognizing her/his affect. Monitoring and interpreting nonverbal communication can provide important insights about a human interacting with the robot and, thus, implicit feedback about the interaction can be achieved. Accordingly, the aim of affective robotics is relieving user’s cognitive burden when the task to accomplish overloads her/his mental capabilities, adapting the behaviour of the robot and implementing a sufficient level of autonomy.

While approaches based on affective robotics are largely considered for socially interacting robots, they are still unexplored in the case of service and industrial robots, where the interaction task and the environmental conditions, such as noise, stress, time constraints, overload the cognitive and emotional burder of the user. Moving along these lines, we are studying methodologies for affective interaction with service and industrial robots, which aim at increasing the safety and efficiency of the interaction system by tuning the level of autonomy of the robotic system, in order to assist the human operator.

Furthermore, we aim at achieving this goal by using non-dedicated multi-purpose devices, such as smartwatches or wristbands for activity tracking, which are easy to be worn and used by the operator and do not interfere with the interaction task.