Estimating Emotion with Biological Information for Robot Interaction

To estimate emotion is difficult, not only for others, but even for people themselves. However, this is important for robots of the future, that are expected to operate in harmony with humans. This study proposes a method of estimating emotion using involuntary biological information. To be able to estimate emotion and feeling, a lot of work has been done in the field of artificial intelligence and robot engineering that focuses on human robot communications, especially where it applies to therapy. Generally, estimating emotions of people is based on expressed information such as facial expression, eye-gazing direction and behaviors that are observable by the robot. However, sometimes this information would not be suitable, as some people do not express themselves with observable information. In this case, it is difficult to estimate the emotion even if the analysis technologies are sophisticated. The main idea of our proposal is to use biological information, brain waves and heart rate for estimating the actual emotion of people that is the result or the nonconscious brain. The first experiment shows that our suggested method will outperform the traditional method, for the people who cannot express emotion directly. And, after changing the technique that measures the degree of joy for each scene and compared it with the subjective evaluation, the second experiment was performed. In the second experiment, accuracy did not change, but accuracy differed greatly for different people. In the analysis, we have found that there is a correlation between parts of the personality and the accuracy of results.