Designing a robot that can sense human emotion
Forget the robot child in the movie “AI.” Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind.
“We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions,” says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.
Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriately, is described in the article, “Online Stress Detection using Psychophysiological Signals for Implicit Human-Robot Cooperation.” The article, which appears in the Dec. issue of the journal Robotica, also reports the initial steps that they have taken to make their vision a reality. EurekAlert!
The abstract is here:
Robots are expected to be pervasive in the society in a not too distant future where they will work extensively as assistants of humans in various activities. With this in view, a novel affect-sensitive architecture for human-robot cooperation is presented in this paper where the robot is expected to recognize human psychological states. As a demonstration, an online heart rate variability analysis to infer the mental stress of a human engaged in a task is presented. This technique involves real-time heart rate monitoring, signal processing using both Fourier Transforrn and Wavelet Transform, and inferring the stress condition based on the level of activation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems using fuzzy logic. Results from human subject trials are presented to validate the presented methodology. This stress detection technique is expected to be useful in the future human-robot cooperation activities, where the robot will recognize human stress and respond appropriately.
