The Maze of Realizing Empathy with Social Robots

Abstract

Current trends envisage an evolution of collaboration, engagement, and relationship between humans and devices, intelligent agents and robots in our everyday life. Some of the key elements under study are affective states, motivation, trust, care, and empathy. This paper introduces an empathy test-bed that serves as a case study for an existing empathy model. The model describes the steps that need to occur in the process to provoke meaning in empathy, as well as the variables and elements that contextualise those steps. Based on this approach we have developed a fun collaborative scenario where a user and a social robot work together to solve a maze. A set of exploratory trials are carried out to gather insights on how users perceive the proposed test-bed around attachment and trust, which are basic elements for the realisation of empathy.