The Emotionally Intelligent Robot: Improving Socially-Aware Human Prediction in Crowded Environments

Abstract

We present a real-time emotion-aware navigation algorithm for social robots. Our approach estimates time-varying emotional behaviors of pedestrians from their faces and trajectories using a combination of Bayesian-inference, CNN-based learning, and the PAD (Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance) model from psychology. These PAD characteristics are used for generating proxemic constraints for each pedestrian. We use a multi-channel model to classify pedestrian characteristics into four emotion categories (happy, sad, angry, neutral) =. In our validation results, we observe an emotion detection accuracy of 85.33%. We formulate emotion-based proxemic constraints to perform socially-aware robot navigation in low- to medium-density environments. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm in simulated environments with tens of pedestrians as well as in a real-world setting with Pepper, a social humanoid robot.