EIRobots

Emotionally Intelligent Robots

Project Description

To workin a complex and unpredictable physical and social environment, people face the use of their physical and intellectual resources when they want to achieve multiple goals in an intelligent and flexible way. Two different and complementary systems of information processing - cognition and emotion - enable people to achieve these goals through simultaneous use. The cognitive system is responsible for interpreting and placing the surrounding world in context, while the emotional system is responsible for evaluating and validating events in order to determine their meaning in relation to people (e.g. positive or negative, desired or undesirable, cheap or harmful, etc.). If the systems are correctly tuned, the emotional system modulates the operating parameters of the cognitive system and the body so that the overall mental and physical performance of the person is improved.
The scientific literature documents the positive impact of emotional intelligence on creative problem solving, attention, perception, memory, decision making, learning, etc.

Taking these facts into account, the project proposed to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is particularly aimed at the interdisciplinary research and development of algorithms for artificial emotional intelligence (EI). It is believed that our scientific attention is directed towards obtaining satisfactory answers to the following questions: Is it possible to transfer/map the human-derived attributes of affective (emotionally controlled) and social behavior to intelligent machines, such as robots and if so, how? The focus of the project is on the modeling of attributes of human emotional intelligence with the aim of developing an EI controller for robots that is able to handle and use emotions, manage relationships with others and ultimately increase the autonomy of the system.

Project Partners

  • Robotics Laboratory, Institute Mihailo Pupin, Belgrad, Serbia