Emotion understanding: robots as tools and models

摘要

learning by imitation, humanrobot interaction, expressive robots 1 Is There a Place for Emotions in Robotics? To many, the title of this chapter might sound like a complete nonsense after all, what do emotions have to do with robots? How could robots possibly tell us anything about them, and more generally about us? Science fiction has typically portrayed robots as prototypes of the unemotional, and this vision largely prevails in science as well as for the layperson, in spite of the proliferation of “affective ” toys and robots. Admittedly, many of these “affective devices ” are little more than “bags of tricks” aimed at entertaining the young (and not so young) and technicallyoriented sectors of the population, rather than pieces of scientific research trying to take a step towards a broader understanding of what emotional phenomena can be; yet these devices can be extremely efficient at achieving their goal, offering us good opportunities to reflect on the human tendency to anthropomorphize even with dealing with the dullest technology (Reeves and Nass 1996) and to perceive the world as emotionally colored.