Joe Crumpton

Papers

Total Citations

114

H-Index

About

Joe Crumpton is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on how robots can communicate emotion through speech. His work sits at the intersection of robotics, affective computing, and speech synthesis, exploring the nuanced ways machines can convey emotional intent to human users. Crumpton's most influential contribution is his 2015 survey on vocal prosody and emotion in robot speech, which has garnered 96 citations and established him as a key voice in the field. This work synthesizes the broader landscape of research on how acoustic features — pitch, speech rate, and volume — can be leveraged to make robots more expressive and socially engaging. Complementing this, his empirical studies using the open-source speech synthesizer MaryTTS demonstrated that robots can successfully communicate emotions such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness by systematically varying prosodic parameters, with novice users able to recognize these emotional cues reliably. His 2014 paper, "Conveying Emotion in Robotic Speech: Lessons Learned," further grounds this work in practical experimentation, offering actionable insights for robot designers. Collectively, Crumpton's research has helped lay a foundation for more emotionally intelligent robots, making him a notable contributor to the growing field of socially aware robotics.