The simulation of an emotional robot implemented with fuzzy logic

Recently, researchers have tried to better understand human behaviors so as to let robots act in more human ways, which means a robot may have its own emotions defined by its designers. To achieve this goal, in this study, we designed and simulated a robot, named Shiau_Lu, which is empowered with six universal human emotions, including happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise. When we input a sentence to Shiau_Lu through voice, it recognizes the sentence by invoking the Google speech recognition method running on an Android system, and outputs a sentence to reveal its current emotional states. Each input sentence affects the strength of the six emotional variables used to represent the six emotions, one corresponding to one. After that, the emotional variables will change into new states. The consequent fuzzy inference process infers and determines the most significant emotion as the primary emotion, with which an appropriate output sentence as a response of the input is chosen from its Output-sentence database. With the new states of the six emotional variables, when the robot encounters another sentence, the above process repeats and another output sentence is then selected and replied. Artificial intelligence and psychological theories of human behaviors have been applied to the robot to simulate how emotions are influenced by the outside world through languages. In fact, the robot may help autistic children to interact more with the world around them and relate themselves well to the outside world.