Thermal Imaging Based Affective Computing for Educational Robot

Abstract

Over the recent years, Social Robots (SRs) have become more and more prominent in everyday human lives. The main goal of a SR is to interact and communicate with human by following social behaviors and affective interaction. However, they still encounter significant limitations in pursuing a natural interaction, mainly due to their hard task of recognizing and understanding human emotions thus ensuring an appropriate response. The aim of this study was to enrich the SR with affective computing capability and real time assessment of the interlocutor’s psychophysiological state, by means of computational psychophysiology based on thermal infrared imaging.