Regulating Human-Robot Interaction using “emotions”, “drives” and facial expressions

This paper presents a motivational system for an autonomous robot which is designed to regulate humanrobot interaction. The mode of social interaction is that of a caretaker-infant dyad where a human acts as the caretaker for the robot. The robot’s motivational system is designed to generate an analogous interaction for a robot-human dyad as for an infantcaretaker dyad. An infant’s emotions and drives play a very important role in generating meaningful interactions with the caretaker (Bullowa 1979). Similarly, the learning task for the robot is to apply various communication skills acquired during social exchanges to manipulate the caretaker such that its drives are satisfied. Toward this goal, the motivational system implements drives, emotions, and facial expressions. The interaction is regulated specifically to promote a suitable learning environment. Although the details of the learning itself are beyond the scope of this paper, this work represents an important step toward realizing robots that can engage in meaningful bi-directional social interactions with humans.