Emotion Generation and Transition of Companion Robots Based on Plutchik’s Model and Quantum Circuit Schemes

Loneliness and isolation are on the rise worldwide, threatening human well-being and the wellness of different age groups and backgrounds. Notably, global social distancing measures during the COVID-19 crisis have exacerbated this problem, resulting in various psychological and physiological ailments. Within both the categories of social and medical robots, companion robots are capable of engaging emotionally with users and providing continuous monitoring and assessment of their health. In this study, we propose a framework for modeling the emotion space of companion robots to facilitate their emotion generation and transition based on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and reversible quantum circuit schemes. Superposition encodings allow fewer computing resources for the generation and storage of emotional states, and by using unitary operations, they facilitate easier emotion transition and recovery over different intervals. Further, an encryption strategy is designed based on the emotion communication architecture to secure the emotion-related data in human-robot interaction. It is hoped that such an integrative framework and research agenda exploring the role of companion robots will be useful to care for users’ social health by mitigating their negative emotions, especially during difficult times.