Towards Artificial Emotions to Assist Social Coordination in HRI

Human-Robot Interaction requires coordination strategies that allow human and artificial agencies to interpret and interleave their actions. In this paper we consider the potential of artificial emotions to serve as coordination devices in human-robot teams. We propose an approach for modelling action selection based on artificial emotions and signalling a robot’s internal state to human team member. We describe an architecture that drives the display of artificial emotional gestures with a model latched internal emotional states. We also present preliminary data on human recognition rates for a candidate set of artificial emotional expressions in a Lego robot.