Human-Robotic Interaction is an emergent field that has been studied for years in much breadth and depth. The use of robots as emotional and therapeutic support aids has been researched with aging and socially exceptional individuals. As conversation based agents such as Siri and Alexa are becoming more prevalent in our society, there has been a desire to make agents more responsive to human social and emotional context cues. Early agent development focused on the ability of these agents to respond with appropriate content as opposed to identifying context related cues for more nuanced dialogue. Our research question asks "Can a robot that shows empathy build a stronger connection to a human user?" We seek to answer this question through the development and deployment of EmoBot - an emotionally responsive robot. EmoBot will provide a simple query to users, "How are you doing?" and will respond accordingly with emotionally sensitive engagements and responses. The EmoBot dialog agent will engage with 3 sentiment types (positive, neutral and negative) and is programmed in Python on the NAOqi SDK for Choreograph.
Researchers:
Lea Davis
Maraya Burks
