A Survey of Behavioural Models for Social Robots

Abstract

The cooperation between humans and robots is becoming increasingly important in our society. Consequently, there is a growing interest in the development of models that can enhance the interaction between humans and robots. A key challenge in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) field is to provide robots with cognitive and affective capabilities, developing architectures that let them establish empathetic relationships with users. Several models have been proposed in recent years to solve this open-challenge. This work provides a survey of the most relevant attempts/works. In details, it offers an overview of the architectures present in literature focusing on three specific aspects of HRI: the development of adaptive behavioural models, the design of cognitive architectures, and the ability to establish empathy with the user. The research was conducted within two databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Accurate exclusion criteria were applied to screen the 1007 articles found (at the end 30 articles were selected). For each work, an evaluation of the model is made. Pros and cons of each work are detailed by analysing the aspects that can be improved so that an enjoyable interaction between robots and users can be established.

Mood classification through physiological parameters

“…As recently underlined in a review paper by Nocentini et al (2019) researchers effort aim to apply the emotion recognition technique to enhance the HRI in a social environment, where the SAR represent an assistant, or even better a companion of daily life. Nevertheless, it is worth to mention that a branch of robotics is addressing the Industry 4.0 challenge (Lu 2017).…”

“…Indeed, the robot should be able to perform all the requested services with advanced human-robot interaction abilities and should be able to adapt its behaviour to the user. In this context, a recent review paper (Nocentini et al 2019) on the development of behavioural models for SAR remark the necessity to include emotions, among other inputs, in the architecture of the robot.…”

Exploring Human attitude during Human-Robot Interaction

“…To overcome the HRI gaps, future social robots require to integrates cognitive models able to create a solid vision of how our interaction patterns work as underlined in this recent review paper [3]. They should be able to create stimulating and engaging interactions in which a user actively participates for an extended period of time.…”