Modeling Motivational States in Adaptive Robot Companions

Motivation impacts people’s lives in a powerful way and is at the heart of a plethora of day-to-day activities and achievement settings, from success at the workplace to learning and acquiring knowledge to trying to quit bad habits. The current work aims to develop an adaptive robot companion that models a user’s daily motivational state and chooses appropriate motivational strategies to keep the user on track for achieving a daily goal. The two main components we are focusing on in this context are creating an ontology-based user model of the person’s motivational states and using an appropriate strategy selection algorithm that chooses the best motivational strategies for the user each day based on the user model’s output. Specifically, we are focusing on the important application domain of physical activity and aim to help early adolescents achieve daily-recommended levels of physical activity. Our human-robot interaction system uses information acquired from the user to feed the user model and physical activity data from a wristband device to inform the strategy selection algorithm.