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Interpretation of Emotional Body Language Displayed by a Humanoid Robot: A Case Study with Children

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Abstract

The work reported in this paper focuses on giving humanoid robots the capacity to express emotions with their body. Previous results show that adults are able to interpret different key poses displayed by a humanoid robot and also that changing the head position affects the expressiveness of the key poses in a consistent way. Moving the head down leads to decreased arousal (the level of energy) and valence (positive or negative emotion) whereas moving the head up produces an increase along these dimensions. Hence, changing the head position during an interaction should send intuitive signals. The study reported in this paper tested children’s ability to recognize the emotional body language displayed by a humanoid robot. The results suggest that body postures and head position can be used to convey emotions during child-robot interaction.

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Notes

  1. http://www.aldebaran-robotics.com/en.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the school “scuola media Dante Alighieri” for hosting the study as well as Arnaud Ducamp and Cornelius Glackin for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

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Author notes

  1. Luisa Damiano

    Present address: Department of Human and Social Sciences, ESARG, University of Bergamo, P.le S. Agostino 2, 24129, Bergamo, Italy

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Embodied Emotion, Cognition and (Inter-)Action Lab, School of Computer Science & STRI, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, AL10 9AB, UK

    Aryel Beck, Lola Cañamero, Antoine Hiolle & Luisa Damiano

  2. Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Via Martiri della Libertà 2, 35137, Padova, Italy

    Piero Cosi, Fabio Tesser & Giacomo Sommavilla

Authors
  1. Aryel Beck
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  2. Lola Cañamero
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  3. Antoine Hiolle
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  4. Luisa Damiano
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  5. Piero Cosi
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  6. Fabio Tesser
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  7. Giacomo Sommavilla
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aryel Beck.

Additional information

This work is funded by the EU FP7 ALIZ-E project (grant number 248116). This paper is an extended and improved version of Beck, A., Cañamero, L., Damiano, L., Sommavilla, G., Tesser, F., Cosi, P.: Children Interpretation of Emotional Body Language Displayed by a Robot. In: Proceeding of Social Robotics, Third International Conference, ICSR 2011, pp 62–70, Springer, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2011).

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Beck, A., Cañamero, L., Hiolle, A. et al. Interpretation of Emotional Body Language Displayed by a Humanoid Robot: A Case Study with Children. Int J of Soc Robotics 5, 325–334 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0193-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-013-0193-z

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