As robots make their way into a variety of environments and start interacting with humans on a regular basis, they should be able to communicate with users as effectively as possible. Over the past decade or so, researchers worldwide have thus been developing machine learning-based models and other computational techniques that could enhance human-robot communications.
One way to improve how robots communicate with human users is by training them to express basic emotions, such as sadness, happiness, fear and anger. The ability to express emotions would ultimately allow robots to convey messages more effectively, in ways that are aligned with a given situation.
Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have recently developed a machine learning-based method to teach robots how to convey what have previously been defined as the seven universal emotions, namely anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise and a neutral state. In their paper, pre-published on arXiv, they applied and tested their technique on a humanoid robot called iCub.