Development of emotional communication robot: WAMOEBA-2R - Experimental evaluation of the emotional communication between robots and humans

This study aims to clarify the cooperation intelligence of robots. This paper describes the autonomous robot named WAMOEBA-2R which can communicate with humans by both an informational and physical way. WAMOEBA-2R has two arms of which each joint has a torque sensor to realize the physical interaction with humans, the function of the voice recognition and the face recognition. The arms are controlled by a distributed agent network system. The network architecture is acquired in a neural network by the feedback-error-learning algorithm. We surveyed 150 visitors at the '99 International Robot Exhibition held in Tokyo (Oct. 1999) to evaluate their psychological impressions of WAMOEBA-2R. As the result, some factors of the human-robot emotional communication were discovered.