Using Empathy to Improve Human-Robot Relationships

Abstract. For robots to become our personal companions in the future, they need to know how to socially interact with us. One defining charac-teristic of human social behaviour is empathy. In this paper, we present a robot that acts as a social companion expressing different kinds of empathic behaviours through its facial expressions and utterances. The robot comments the moves of two subjects playing a chess game against each other, being empathic to one of them and neutral towards the other. The results of a pilot study suggest that users to whom the robot was empathic perceived the robot more as a friend