Emotional Intelligence in Robotics: A Scoping Review

Abstract

Research suggests that emotionally responsive machines that can simulate empathy increase de acceptance of users towards them, as the feeling of affinity towards the machine reduces negative perceptual feedback. In order to endow a robot with emotional intelligence, it must be equipped with sensors capable of capturing users’ emotions (sense), appraisal captured emotions to regulate its internal state (compute), and finally perform tasks where actions are regulated by the computed “emotional” state (act). However, despite the im-pressive progress made in recent years in terms of artificial intelligence, speech recognition and synthesis, computer vision and many other disciplines directly and indirectly related to artificial emotional recognition and behavior, we are still far from being able to endow robots with the empathic capabilities of a human being. This article aims to give an overview of the implications of intro-ducing emotional intelligence in robotic constructions by discussing recent ad-vances in emotional intelligence in robotics.