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Adapting to My User, Engaging with My Robot: An Adaptive Affective Architecture for a Social Assistive Robot

Published: 19 November 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Affective feedback from social robots is a useful technique for communicating to people whether they are interacting “well” with the robot or not. However, some users, such as people with physical or cognitive difficulties, may not be able to interact in all the desired ways. In these cases, affective feedback from the robot could be excessively negative—an “unhappy” robot, leading to an unrewarding experience for the user. This article presents a motivation-based architecture for an autonomous multimodal social robot, that incorporates an affective feedback mechanism which generates an affective state by combining the internal needs of the robot and the social interaction quality. The balance between these two factors can dynamically change, allowing the robot to adapt its affective feedback to the user's interaction style and capabilities. We have implemented this architecture in a simulation and in a MiRo social robot, and report experiments examining the behavior of the system in interactions with different experimental user profiles. The results show that the adaptive mechanism allows the robot to change its affective feedback to give more positive encouragement to users than in non-adaptive cases.

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  1. Adapting to My User, Engaging with My Robot: An Adaptive Affective Architecture for a Social Assistive Robot

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
      ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 15, Issue 6
      December 2024
      727 pages
      EISSN:2157-6912
      DOI:10.1145/3613712
      • Editor:
      • Huan Liu
      Issue’s Table of Contents

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 19 November 2024
      Online AM: 31 August 2024
      Accepted: 12 August 2024
      Revised: 23 January 2024
      Received: 02 September 2022
      Published in TIST Volume 15, Issue 6

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      Author Tags

      1. Affective Cognitive Robot Architecture
      2. Biologically-Inspired Robot Motivations and Emotions
      3. Decision Making
      4. Human–Robot Interaction
      5. Social Assistive Robots

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      • Robots sociales para mitigar la soledad y el aislamiento en mayores (SOROLI)
      • Agencia Estatal de Investigación (AEI), Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación

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