Modelling Empathy in Social Robotic Companions

Empathy can be broadly defined as the ability to understand and respond appropriately to the affective states of others. In this paper, we present a scenario where a social robot acts as a chess companion for children, and describe our current efforts towards endowing such robot with empathic capabilities. A multimodal framework for modeling some of the user’s affective states that combines visual and task-related features is presented. Using this model of the user, we personalise the learning environment by adapting the robot’s empathic responses to the particular preferences of the child who is interacting with the robot. We also describe a preliminary study conducted in this scenario.