Body Language in Affective Human-Robot Interaction

Social human-robot interaction is concerned with exploring the ways in which social interaction can be achieved between a human and a sociable robot. Affect has an important role in interaction as it helps interactants coordinate and indicate the success of the communication. Designing socially intelligent robots requires competence in communication, which includes exchanges of both verbal and non-verbal cues. This project will focus on non-verbal communication, more specifically body movements, postures and gestures as means of conveying socially affective information. Using the affective grounding perspective, which conceptualizes emotion as a coordination mechanism, together with honest signals as a measurement of the dynamics of the interaction, and the robot Pepper, we aim to develop a system that would be able to communicate affect, with the goal to enhance affective human-robot interaction.