Psychophysiological control architecture for human-robot coordination-concepts and initial experiments

The use of robots is expected to be pervasive in many spheres of society: in hospitals, homes, offices and battlefields, where the robots will need to interact and cooperate closely with a variety of people. The paper proposes an innovative approach to human-robot cooperation where the robot will be able to recognize the psychological state of the interacting human and modify its (i.e., robot's) own action to make the human feel comfortable in working with the robot. Wearable biofeedback sensors are used to measure a variety of physiological indices to infer the underlying psychological states (affective states) of the human. The eventual idea is to correlate the psychological states with the actions of the robot to determine which action(s) is responsible for a particular affective state. The robot controller will then modify that action if there is a need to alter the affective state. A concept of such a control architecture, a requirement analysis, and initial results from human experiments for stress detection are presented.