Gestural Behavioral Implementation on a Humanoid Robotic Platform for Effective Social Interaction

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2014), Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2014.DOI: 10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926297The role of emotions in social scenarios is to provide an inherent mode of communication between two parties. When emotions are properly employed and understood, people are able to respond appropriately, which further enhances the social interaction. Ultimately, effective emotion execution in social settings has the capability to build rapport, improve engagement, optimize learning, provide comfort, and increase overall likability. In this paper, we discuss associating dominant emotions of effective social interaction to gestural behaviors on a humanoid robotic platform. Studies with 13 participants interacting with the robot show that by integrating key principles related to the characteristics of happy and sad emotions, the intended emotion is perceived across all participants with 95.19% and 94.23% sensitivity, respectively