Abstract-Nowadays robots are being created that interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. Following this trend, the development of the social robot Probo has started. The robot will be used in hospitals, as a tele-interface for entertainment, communication and medical assistance. Therefore, it requires the ability to express emotions. In order to do so, an emotional interface is developed to fully configure the display of emotions. These emotions -represented as a vector in an emotion space-are mapped to the degrees of freedom used in the robot. Besides emotions, the interface includes a control for the point of attention and a module to create and store animations. A 3D virtual model is created, acting as a virtual replica of the robot, providing realistic visual feedback to evaluate the design choices for the facial expressions. This paper presents the objectives of this new robot and describe the concepts and design of the first prototype.Index Terms-Human robot interaction, robot assisted therapy, robot design.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Abstract. This paper presents our recent and current work on expressive speech synthesis and recognition as enabling technologies for affective robot-child interaction. We show that current expression recognition systems could be used to discriminate between several archetypical emotions, but also that the old adage "there's no data like more data" is more than ever valid in this field. A new speech synthesizer was developed that is capable of high quality concatenative synthesis. This system will be used in the robot to synthesize expressive nonsense speech by using prosody transplantation and a recorded database with expressive speech examples. With these enabling components lining up, we are getting ready to start experiments towards hopefully effective child-machine communication of affect and emotion.