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Computational models of emotions can not only improve the effectiveness and efficiency of human-robot interaction but also coordinate a robot to adapt to its environment better. When designing computational models of emotions for socially interactive robots, especially for robots for people with special needs such as autistic children, one should take into account the social and communicative characteristics of such groups of people. This article presents a novel computational model of emotions called AppraisalCloudPCT that is suitable for socially interactive robots that can be adopted in autistic rehabilitation which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first computational model of emotions built for robots that can satisfy the needs of a special group of people such as autistic children. To begin with, some fundamental and notable computational models of emotions (e.g., OCC, Scherer’s appraisal theory, PAD) that have deep and profound influence on building some significant models (e.g., PRESENCE, iGrace, xEmotion) for socially interactive robots are revisited. Then, a comparative assessment between our AppraisalCloudPCT and other five significant models for socially interactive robots is conducted. Great efforts have been made in building our proposed model to meet all of the six criteria for comparison, by adopting the appraisal theories on emotions, perceptual control theory on emotions, a component model view of appraisal models, and cloud robotics. Details of how to implement our model in a socially interactive robot we developed for autistic rehabilitation are also elaborated in this article. Future studies should examine how our model performs in different robots and also in more interactive scenarios.

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