Hello, robot, I want to have a chat with you.

Can robots communicate emotionally with humans?

When robots communicate with humans, in addition to language, can they convey emotional information through facial expressions, voice intonation, tone, eye contact, or even body language?

We know that communication between people is natural and emotional. Therefore, in the interaction between people and robots, people also expect robots to have emotional abilities like humans.

Therefore, how to make robots have human emotions has become a hot topic in artificial intelligence research.

Figure 1. Robot communicating with people

How to make robots "understand" emotions?

When educating their children, Chinese parents often say that when interacting with others, they should know how to observe the "eyebrows and eyes". The "eyebrows and eyes" here means that when communicating with others, we should not only understand what the other person says, but also learn to observe the other person's tone, expression, and body language, and understand the emotional information contained therein. Only in this way can we better understand the other person's true thoughts and communicate smoothly. Emotions play an important role in people's emotional behavior and emotional decision-making, and emotional ability is also one of the important signs of human intelligence.

Figure 2 The emotional "Einstein" robot (Hanson Robotics, USA)

Have you noticed that human emotions have many common characteristics, that is, rules? Let's take body language as an example. Body language originates from life, such as nodding, shaking head, eye contact, gestures, and body movements. For example, nodding means that a person agrees with an event; shaking head means that a person opposes an event; the constant shaking of a part of the body reflects emotional tension; when a person is sad, in addition to a sad face, he will also beat his chest and stamp his feet; when he is happy, he will smile and dance. In short, various body movements are also the natural expression and release of emotions.

What is Affective Computing?

First of all, we define the concept of "emotional computing" here. "Emotional computing" is to give robots the ability to observe, understand and generate various emotional characteristics similar to humans, and ultimately enable robots to interact naturally, emotionally and vividly like humans.

The research of affective computing can be roughly divided into three parts: affective modeling, affective recognition, and affective generation. Simply put, first find out the laws of human emotions and determine the characteristic signals generated by emotions; then express these laws mathematically and build a mathematical model that robots can execute; finally, let the robot execute the model and "produce" its own emotions.

Is affective computing possible?

Emotional computing has been accompanied by controversy since its birth. Some researchers believe that emotions are incalculable, that emotions are unique to humans, and that robots cannot simulate or create them. At the same time, emotional computing is an unnecessary "luxury" in the field of artificial intelligence.

Some people have suggested that human emotions are very complex and often intertwined, and that they may require a huge amount of data to be expressed, and that “calculation” is not realistic. Others have suggested that “the intensity of emotional feelings and expressions is usually not a linear function relationship with the changes in various physiological indicators. Most of them are nonlinear, discontinuous, fuzzy, probabilistic, and fluctuating function relationships.

Things are constantly progressing and developing in debates. We should not only see the difficulty and complexity of realizing emotional computing, but also see the inevitability of its realization. I believe that in the near future, robots will be able to have natural and harmonious emotional exchanges with us humans.