Integration of emotional reactions on human facial expressions into the robot head MEXI

Emotion recognition and adequate reactions are a crucial part of human communication and hence should also be considered for interactions between humans and robots. In this paper we present the robot head MEXI which is able to recognize emotions of its human counterpart from a video sequence using a fuzzy rule based approach. It reacts on these perceptions in an emotional way. Therefor MEXI maintains an internal state made up of (artificial) emotions and drives. This internal state is used to evaluate its perceptions and action alternatives and controls its behavior on the basis of this evaluation. This is a major difference between MEXI and usual goal based agents that rely on a world model to control and plan their actions. 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.