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A new emotional robot assistant that facilitates human interaction and persuasion

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Abstract

The development of robots that are truly sociable requires understanding how human interactions can be applied to the interaction between humans and robots. A sociable robot must be able to interact with people taking into account aspects like verbal and non-verbal communications (emotions, postures, gestures). This work presents a social robot which main goal is to provide assistance to older people in carrying out their daily activities (through suggestions or reminders). In addition, the robot presents non-verbal communications like perceiving emotions and displaying human identifiable emotions in order to express empathy. A prototype of the robot is being tested in a daycare center in the northern area of Portugal.

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  1. https://keras.io/.

  2. https://www.tensorflow.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4-1-R and the FPI Grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. This work is supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and Post-Doc scholarship SFRH/BPD/102696/2014 (Angelo Costa).

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Correspondence to Vicente Julian.

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Rincon, J.A., Costa, A., Novais, P. et al. A new emotional robot assistant that facilitates human interaction and persuasion. Knowl Inf Syst 60, 363–383 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1231-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1231-9

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