Page 86 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 8

PLAYING THE EMOTION GAME WITH FEELIX

What Can a LEGO Robot Tell Us about Emotion?

Lola D. Cañamero
Department of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire

Abstract This chapter reports the motivations and choices underlying the design of Feelix,
a simple humanoid LEGO robot that displays different emotions through facial
expression in response to physical contact. It concludes by discussing what this
simple technology can tell us about emotional expression and interaction.

1. Introduction

It is increasingly acknowledged that social robots and other artifacts inter-
acting with humans must incorporate some capabilities to express and elicit
emotions in order to achieve interactions that are natural and believable to the
human side of the loop. The complexity with which these emotional capabil-
ities are modeled varies in different projects, depending on the intended pur-
pose and richness of the interactions. Simple models have for example been
integrated in affective educational toys for small children [7], or in robots per-
forming a particular task in very specific contexts [11]. Sophisticated robots
designed to entertain socially rich relationships with humans [1] incorporate
more complex and expressive models. Finally, other projects such as [10] have
focused on the study of emotional expression for the sole purpose of social
1
interaction; this was also our purpose in building Feelix . We approached this
issue from a “minimalist” perspective, using a small set of features that would
make emotional expression and interaction believable and at the same time eas-
ily analyzable, and that would allow us to assess to what extent we could rely
on the tendency humans have to anthropomorphize in their interactions with
objects presenting human-like features [8].
2
Previous work by Jakob Fredslund on Elektra , the predecessor of Feelix,
showed that: (a) although people found it very natural to interpret the happy
and sad expressions of Elektra’s smiley-like face, more expressions were needed