On the design of an emotional interface for the huggable robot Probo

Recently, more robots are being created to interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. From this point of view we started with the development of a social robot named Probo, intended to comfort and emotionally interact with hospitalized children. In this paper we present the objectives of this new robot and describe the concepts of the first prototype. The robot will be employed in the hospital, as a tele-interface for entertainment, communication and medical assistance. Therefore it requires the ability to express emotions, in order to do so, an emotional interface is developed to fully configure the display of emotions. The emotions, represented as a vector in an emotion space, are mapped to the degrees of freedom used in our robot. A 3D virtual model is created, providing realistic visual feedback to evaluate our design choices for the facial expressions. Images of these expressions were used in a comparison test with children.