Keywords

Emotion State Generator, ESG, Behavior State Generator, BSG, Human-Robot Interaction, HRI, Fuzzy Logic, Affective Computing, Emotion-like state, Emotion, Facial Expression, Sensory Motor Level, Multilevel Theory of Emotion, Leventhal

Abstract

In this thesis, we aim at modeling some aspects of the functional role of emotions on an autonomous embodied agent. We begin by describing our robotic prototype, Cherry--a robot with the task of being a tour guide and an office assistant for the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Cherry did not have a formal emotion representation of internal states, but did have the ability to express emotions through her multimodal interface. The thesis presents the results of a survey we performed via our social informatics approach where we found that: (1) the idea of having emotions in a robot was warmly accepted by Cherry's users, and (2) the intended users were pleased with our initial interface design and functionalities. Guided by these results, we transferred our previous code to a human-height and more robust robot--Petra, the PeopleBot™--where we began to build a formal emotion mechanism and representation for internal states to correspond to the external expressions of Cherry's interface. We describe our overall three-layered architecture, and propose the design of the sensory motor level (the first layer of the three-layered architecture) inspired by the Multilevel Process Theory of Emotion on one hand, and hybrid robotic architecture on the other hand. The sensory-motor level receives and processes incoming stimuli with fuzzy logic and produces emotion-like states without any further willful planning or learning. We will discuss how Petra has been equipped with sonar and vision for obstacle avoidance as well as vision for face recognition, which are used when she roams around the hallway to engage in social interactions with humans. We hope that the sensory motor level in Petra could serve as a foundation for further works in modeling the three-layered architecture of the Emotion State Generator.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2004

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Lisetti, Christine L.

Degree

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Degree Program

Computer Science

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0000286

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0000286

Language

English

Release Date

January 2009

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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