Effects of emotional synchronization in human-robot KANSEI communications

Human-robot communication is an important subject for housekeeping, elderly care and entertainment robots. To make a natural communication entrainment between human and robot, emotion plays a vital role. From this view point we have developed a KANSEI communication system based on emotional synchronization. The robotic emotion was entrained to human emotion by using a vector field of dynamics, and then the robot made a facial expression to express the robot emotion. In this paper we investigate the effect of the emotional synchronization in human-robot KANSEI communications. We conducted experiments to evaluate the effects of the proposed system based on emotional synchronization. In the experiments of human-robot interaction using the emotional synchronization, we found that human feeling became comfortable when the robot made the synchronized facial expression to human emotion. Then it was confirmed that emotional synchronization in human-robot interaction could be effective to keep a comfortable state.