Integrating Emotional Competence into Man-Machine Collaboration

Emotional competence plays a crucial role in human communication and hence should also be considered for improving cooperation between humans and robots. In this paper we present an architecture and its realization in the robot head MEXI, which is able to recognize emotions of its human counterpart and to react adequately in an emotional way by representing its own emotions in its facial expression and speech output. Furthermore, mechanisms for emotion and drive regulation are presented. Therefor MEXI maintains an internal state made up of (artificial) emotions and drives. This internal state is used to evaluate its perceptions and action alternatives and controls its behavior on the basis of this evaluation. This is a major difference between MEXI and usual goal based agents that rely on a world model to control and plan their actions.