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In this presentation we would like to provide our contribution to answer the following question: how to develop a robot such that the audience is able to form emotional bond with?

Create an emotional bond is important because it generates a positive engagement, it increases the envy to continue the experience and finally the robot is step by step accepted by the audience and it becomes part of the environment.

Our claim is that, for a robot, to be able to arouse feelings from the audience and thus open the possibility to create an emotional bond, it should rely on the following principles:

- Body language/Emotion : the robot is able to mimic postures which stimulate feelings from the audience;
- Voice and Tone: non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone of voice combined with gestures communicate a great deal more than the words that are spoken;
- Art/Design. Visual appealing is a strong factor;
- Story telling - "character" evolution of the robot and/or the possibility to tell "personal stories";
- Personality/uniqueness. Because of cultural differences, gender, the fact that people tend to belong to groups drove by specific values, the above factors may have to be customized in order to match different group's expectations.

In order to test our claims, we developed a humanoid robot, implemented some postures and finally came up with the concept of "Seating tattletale robot".

The first postures we tested are quite innovative in the sense that we were the first one to implement them:
- Walking with different "moods" like a depressed mood;
- Taking a daily like posture such as leaning against a wall;
- Seating on a chair and taking various postures.

A more ambitious project consists in what we call a "seating tattletale robot". The objective is to define:
- The "mood spectrum" for the robot (happy, angry, neutral, depressed...);
- Different topics you are interested in (sport, finance, politics, celebrities.), for each topic what are you precisely looking for (for instance in sport, then football, then the score of your favorite team) and
- Finally how the tattletale robot will present the information to you. For instance be happy to announce a good score of your favorite team.

The tattletale robot will search on internet, and based on what it found, it will report it with a specific posture and associated voice/tone. We think that adding a voice with a tone in congruence with the posture changes the way the audience will look at the
robot and increase the probability that the experience becomes pleasant, joyful and playful.

At this stage, the robot is able to sit down and mimic different postures such as "applaud", "thinking", "a bit anxious", "taking a rest", " anger". We post-recorded voices and change the tone of the voice in order to match the postures.

Biography: Fabrice Noreils got his PhD in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in 1989 At LAAS-CNRS Paul Sabatier University - France and published more than 30 articles in the field of mobile robotics. In the late 90's he implements AI techniques for some projects in the telecommunication industry (constellation of satellites in low orbits, mobile radio network) and his the author / coauthor of three patents. After spending 15 years in the telecommunication sector he decided to come back to Robotics, developing humanoid robots with a focus on Art, Dynamics and Emotions.

Link:
Fabrice Noreils

[image source: Fabrice Noreils]
[source: Vive Les Robots!]