A Robot Expressing Emotions Through Gestures: Everyone Outside of Italy Would Understand this?

Abstract

In the context of our research activities on affective computing and human-robot interaction we are working on both the recognition of human's emotions and the expression of emotions by robots. In our vision, robots will be increasingly present in schools, factories, and homes, and their empathetic behavior may foster their acceptance. In particular, in one of our research, we sought to replicate gestures associated with specific emotions on a social robot, NAO. Our focus was on Ekman's six primary emotions, along with five emotions selected from Plutchik's wheel of emotions. In our opinion the cultural component linked to the expression of emotions through gestures certainly influenced both us and the participants. Thus, we would like to investigate the influence of our culture in the gestural expression of emotion.