Robot's emotional expression generation based on context information and combination of behavior database

Abstract

Attempts to put robots to practical use have been increasing, as robot becomes more human-friendly. In the human-robot interaction field, main issues are how variously the robot can express its emotion and how much the expression is socially acceptable. This paper proposes a robot's expression generation method based on the context information and combination of behavior database for emotional interactive service. Our goal is to generate synchronized multimodal expressions automatically using a few of pre-defined database and the context information inputs. Overall procedure is separated by offline task using a GUI-based editing toolkit and online task using an automatic generation method. In the offline task, behavior database is formulated corresponding to types of sentences and robot's emotional state. For automatic generation, we propose primitive database based on parameters and organizing behavior database. In the online task, using context information inputs, robot generates new expression automatically. Proposed generation method is to combine pre-defined behavior database using parameters of the primitive database and interpolation method. Finally, generated synchronized multimodal expressions are refined according to a robot's hardware.