Emotional Robotics: Tug of War

Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior

Volume

Papers from the 2008 AAAI Spring Symposium

Contents

Emotional communication skills are dominant in biological systems. Despite the apparent complexity of creating and broadcasting emotional cues, the expression is concise, making them effective and advantageous for multi-agent environments where communication bandwidth is limited and in high demand. However, social robots run the risk of being deceived and used by an opponent using friendly emotional cues. To study this security glitch, we present an interactive environment in which a person can learn the robot's emotional responses through interaction. We then present Tug of War, a game where two people compete for the heart of one robot. The system described is a potential test bed for human-robot interaction, both for engineers, and clinical psychologists.