Attentional and emotional regulation in human-robot interaction

In this paper, we propose a human-robot interaction system that exploits emotion and attention to regulate and adapt the robotic interactive behavior. In particular, we will focus on the relation between arousal, predictability, and attentional allocation considering as a case study a robotic manipulator interacting with a human operator. We rely on a frequency based model of attention allocation and a 4-dimensional model of emotion. The experiment reported in this paper explores the effectiveness of an attentional regulation mechanisms modulated by arousal and predictability values extracted from the human voice. The collected results show that the attentional modulation, mediated by basic emotional speech features, provides a natural and computationally light regulation mechanism for coordinating the robotic behaviors.