Scientists at the Queen Mary, Hertfordshire and Heriot-Watt universities are part of the EU-funded LIREC project to develop software that allows robots to respond to human emotions and change their behavior accordingly.
They hope that by understanding how humans recognize emotions, they will be able to create mathematical models that robots can use to read social situations. This could then allow robots to be more commonly used in homes, schools and offices.
Krzysztof Tchon / LIREC Consortium
"It's about figuring out how biology does it and trying to build systems that do the same," Professor Peter McOwan of Queen Mary told The Engineer at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition this week in London.
"We want to have a better understanding of how human brains process information about faces and build those ideas in the next generation of socially aware robotic partners."
Part of this process involves developing software that can recognize the movement on people's faces in order to understand their emotions.
The work also involves running psychological experiments on people, asking them to make judgments about facial images and using the answers to understand how the brain processes facial information.
For example, the team found that humans find it difficult to see features or unusual changes in the face image if it is upside down.
They also found that people were able to recognize their friends by the way their faces moved as they spoke, using a computer-generated character that imitated their actual movements.
The first use of the technology is likely to be in education and an INESC-ID institute team in Portugal is creating a robotic cat to teach children how to play chess.
"You find that people are much more likely to engage in a learning experience if they feel they are emotionally involved in it and that those physical forms in the robots are able to express their emotion," McOwan said.
The project is also exploring how robots can be integrated into offices and homes, especially for the elderly or disabled, for example, to remind them to take medication.