Emotional states based 3-D Fuzzy Atmosfield for casual communication between humans and robots

Abstract

Emotional states based three-dimensional (3-D) Fuzzy Atmosfield (FA) is proposed to express the feeling between humans and robots in communication, and is built with 3-D coordinates, i.e. "friendly-hostile", "lively-calm", and "casual formal" axes. The FA aims to be an effective tool to proceed with the communication paying attention to the atmosphere generated by individual emotional state which is calculated from bimodal communication cues namely emotional-speech and emotional gesture by using weighted fusion and fuzzy inference. A novel emotion recognition approach is presented which consists of two steps, i.e., classification of six basic emotions for initial emotional states in the Affinity-Pleasure-Arousal emotion space, and emotional transition from prior state by using fuzzy logic. Home party enjoying demonstration confirms FA's availability empirically by questionnaires from unrelated persons of authors' group, where smooth communication between four humans and five eye robots is realized in Mascot Robot System.