Investigating emotional interaction with a robotic dog

Abstract

Next generation of consumer-level entertainment robots should offer more natural engaging interaction. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a consumer-level robotic dog with acoustic emotion recognition capabilities. The dog can recognise the emotional state of its owner from affective cues in the owner's speech and respond with appropriate actions. The evaluation study shows that users can recognise the new robotic dog to be emotionally intelligent and report that this makes the dog appear more 'alive'.