Towards Empathetic Human-Robot Interactions

TL;DR

This paper discusses developing empathetic robots capable of recognizing human emotions and high-level communication cues using signal processing, sentiment analysis, and machine learning, exemplified by the prototype Zara the Supergirl.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining deep learning and signal processing to enable robots to understand and respond to human emotions and humor.

Findings

Deep learning improves emotion and sentiment recognition accuracy.

Prototype Zara demonstrates empathetic interaction capabilities.

Future work aims to enhance android development for better human life integration.

Abstract

Since the late 1990s when speech companies began providing their customer-service software in the market, people have gotten used to speaking to machines. As people interact more often with voice and gesture controlled machines, they expect the machines to recognize different emotions, and understand other high level communication features such as humor, sarcasm and intention. In order to make such communication possible, the machines need an empathy module in them which can extract emotions from human speech and behavior and can decide the correct response of the robot. Although research on empathetic robots is still in the early stage, we described our approach using signal processing techniques, sentiment analysis and machine learning algorithms to make robots that can "understand" human emotion. We propose Zara the Supergirl as a prototype system of empathetic robots. It is a software based virtual android, with an animated cartoon character to present itself on the screen. She will get "smarter" and more empathetic through its deep learning algorithms, and by gathering more data and learning from it. In this paper, we present our work so far in the areas of deep learning of emotion and sentiment recognition, as well as humor recognition. We hope to explore the future direction of android development and how it can help improve people's lives.