Page 90 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Playing the Emotion Game with Feelix 73

pression with vocal inflection and facial expression while commenting on the
expression (‘ooh, poor you!’, ‘look, now it’s happy!’). People thus seem to
“empathize” with the robot quite naturally.

4. What Features, What Interactions?

What level of complexity must the emotional expressions of a robot have to
be better recognized and accepted by humans? The answer partly depends on
the kinds of interactions that the human-robot couple will have. The literature,
mostly about analytic models of emotion, does not provide much guidance to
the designer of artifacts. Intuitively, one would think that artifacts inspired by
a category approach have simpler designs, whereas those based on a compo-
nential approach permit richer expressions. For this purpose, however, more
complex is not necessarily better, and some projects, such as [10] and Feelix,
follow the idea put forward by Masahiro Mori (reported, e.g., in [9]) that the
progression from a non-realistic to a realistic representation of a living thing is
nonlinear, reaching an “uncanny valley” when similarity becomes almost, but
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not quite perfect ; a caricaturized representation of a face can thus be more
acceptable and believable to humans than a realistic one, which can present
distracting elements for emotion recognition and where subtle imperfections
can be very disturbing. Interestingly, Breazeal’s robot Kismet [1], a testbed
to investigate infant-caretaker interactions, and Feelix implement “opposite”
models based on dimensions and categories, respectively, opening up the door
to an investigation of this issue from a synthetic perspective. For example, it
would be very interesting to investigate whether Feelix’s expressions would
be similarly understood if designed using a componential perspective, and to
single out the meaning attributed to different expressive units and their roles
in the emotional expressions in which they appear. Conversely, one could ask
whether Kismet’s emotional expression system could be simpler and based on
discrete emotion categories, and still achieve the rich interactions it aims at.
Let us now discuss some of our design choices in the light of the relevant
design guidelines proposed by Breazeal in [2] for robots to achieve human-like
interaction with humans.

Issue I. The robot should have a cute face to trigger the ‘baby-scheme’ and
motivate people to interact with it. Although one can question the cuteness
of Feelix, the robot does present some of the features that trigger the ‘baby-
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scheme’ , such as a big head, big round eyes, and short legs. However, none
of these features is used in Feelix to express or elicit emotions. Interestingly,
many people found that Feelix’s big round (fixed) eyes were disturbing for
emotion recognition, as they distracted attention from the relevant (moving)
features. In fact, it was mostly Feelix’s expressive behavior that elicited the
baby-scheme reaction.