Emotional Communication with the Robot Head MEXI

This paper presents the robot head MEXI which is able to communicate to humans in an emotional way. MEXI recognizes emotions of its human counterpart from the prososdy of his or her natural speech using a fuzzy rule based approach. MEXI reacts on its perceptions by showing artificial emotions in its facial expressions and in the prosody of its synthesized natural speech. MEXI does not rely on a world model to control and plan its actions like usual goal based agents. Instead MEXI uses its internal state consisting of emotions and drives to evaluate its perceptions and action alternatives and controls its behavior on the basis of this evaluation. For MEXI, the behavior based programming paradigm originally developed by Arkin for robot navigation was extended to support a multidimensional control architecture based on emotions and drives