FEELINGS...OWWOWO...FEELINGS:

ROBO SPACE: Designing A Robot That Can Sense Human Emotion (Space Daily, Dec 18, 2002)

Forget the robot child in the movie "AI." Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith have a less romantic but more practical idea in mind. "We are not trying to give a robot emotions. We are trying to make robots that are sensitive to our emotions," says Smith, associate professor of psychology and human development.

Their vision, which is to create a kind of robot Friday, a personal assistant who can accurately sense the moods of its human bosses and respond appropriately, is described in the article, "Online Stress Detection using Psychophysiological Signals for Implicit Human-Robot Cooperation."

The article, which appears in the Dec. issue of the journal Robotica, also reports the initial steps that they have taken to make their vision a reality.

"Psychological research shows that a lot of our communications, human to human, are implicit," says Sarkar, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering.

"The better we know the other person the better we get at understanding the psychological state of that person. So the prime motivation of our researchis to determine whether a robot can sense the psychological state of a human person. Sooner or later, robots will be everywhere. As they become increasingly common, they will need to interact with humans in a more natural fashion."

Tens of thousands of years of evolution hasn't even produced a human male who's empathetic and they think they can do it with machines? Posted by Orrin Judd at December 19, 2002 7:49 AM