Experimental Evaluation of the Emotional Communication between Robots and Humans

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the intelligence which realizes emotional and physical communication between human and robots. This paper describes the autonomous robot named WAMOEBA 2R which can communicate with humans by both informational and physical way. WAMOEBA-2R has the two arms of which each joint has torque sensor controlled by distributed agent network system. The coefficients in the network architecture are autonomously acquired by using the feedback-error-learning algorithm. We surveyed 150 visitors at the '99 International Robot Exhibition held in Tokyo (Oct. 1999) and 74 visitors at the '99 Tottori Industrial Technology Fair held in Tottori (Nov. 1999) to evaluate their psychological impressions of WAMOEBA-2R. As a result, some factors of the human-robot emotional communication were discovered.