Sarwar Hussain Paplu

"Emotional Intelligence in Human-Robot Interaction"

Emotional Intelligence (EI) a form of social intelligence involving the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions. Existing AI systems lack the perception of human emotions, intentions, personality traits or behavioral pattern in a typical interaction process. Robotic systems employed to work concurrently with humans often can not keep pace with humans in terms of expressiveness and attention due to the inability of the systems to understand or decode emotions of their co-workers. State-of-the-art machine learning approaches focusing computer vision and pattern recognition can be of great use to recognize the psychological and emotional cues. In this talk, I will be discussing on the ideas of the implementation of a system capable of understanding and expressing appropriate emotional states. Development of an emotion-based control architecture is vital in the this regard. The perception and control system of our existing robotic system (Robin) plays an important role in establishing the interaction between the robot and a human. A short overview on my ongoing efforts in the direction of the proposed research work will also be presented. Among other areas that I work on include recognition of personality traits using nonverbal cues, generation of suitable gestures and facial expressions, social distance awareness etc. The combination of psychological, emotional and linguistic aspects in a Human-Robot Interaction paves the way for a robust social robotic system, ensuring to exhibit more natural behavior.

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