Modeling Affect in Socially Interactive Robots

Humans use expressions of emotion in a very social manner, to convey messages such as "I'm happy to see you" or "I want to be comforted," and people's long-term relationships depend heavily on shared emotional experiences. We believe that for robots to interact naturally with humans in social situations they should also be able to express emotions in both short-term and long-term relationships. To this end, we have developed an affective model for social robots. This generative model attempts to create natural, human-like affect and includes distinctions between immediate emotional responses, the overall mood of the robot, and long-term attitudes toward each visitor to the robot. This paper presents the general affect model as well as particular details of our implementation of the model on one robot, the Roboceptionist