A Systematic Review of Human-Robot Interaction: The Use of Emotions and the Evaluation of Their Performance

In human-robot interaction (HRI), it is essential for the robot to recognize human emotions and also to be able to convey emotions. With this accomplished, interactions between humans and robots can become natural and empathetic. Additionally, it is important to emphasize the significance of user-centered design evaluation when developing HRI systems, ensuring that user needs and preferences are considered from the initial design phases to the final implementation. This user-centered approach can significantly contribute to the effectiveness and acceptance of robotic systems in human interaction. Therefore, this article aims to conduct a systematic literature review on HRI to address two questions: (i) how has the literature approached the use of emotions in human-robot interaction? and (ii) how was the performance of using emotions in HRI evaluated in these studies? For this purpose, 72 articles were selected using a systematic methodology. The selected literature works have shown a tendency to use HRI with emotions in robots in two ways. The first is developing methods for recognizing emotions in humans. The second is studying how to represent emotions in robots so that HRI can become natural and friendly. Furthermore, it can be observed that the majority of the articles considered here used an inquiry method with the presence of participants to evaluate the robotic performance system.