Creating a model of human behavior

For the robot to support conducting a conversation, we must also have a model of how the human it is talking to is feeling. You may have had a friend or relation who went on talking about themselves and were oblivious to how you were feeling or reacting to their conversation. We don’t want that type of robot personality. Therefore, the robot has to have some internal representation of how it thinks you are feeling. We will not be using vision for this function, so the only way the robot knows how you are doing is by asking questions and evaluating the use of language.

We will give the robot a human model similar to our state machine but with just four emotions on two axes: happy/sad and friendly/distant. The robot will assume that everyone is somewhere in the middle when the conversation begins. The robot can use clues in language to understand how you might be feeling, so we will assign colors or shades of emotions to words to help drive...