NRI: FND: Creating Trust Between Groups of Humans and Robots Using a Novel Music Driven Robotic Emotion Generator

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This project will perform fundamental research contributing to the establishment of trust between humans and robots through the development of novel emotional communication channels. As co-robots become prevalent at home, work, and public spaces, they need to become trust-worthy and socially believable agents if they are to be integrated into and accepted by society. The research will utilize the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence to gain knowledge about of the role of non-linguistic expressions in trust building. Findings from studies about non-linguistic emotional expressions such as prosody and gestures in music - one of the most emotionally meaningful human experiences - will be implemented in a group of newly developed personal robots. User experiments will be conducted to explore humans' reactions to - and trust building with - these prosody-driven robots. Results of the study will lead to novel approaches for creating open and meaningful interactions between groups of humans and robots. The research will advance national prosperity by increasing engagement, relatability, and trust in large scale human-robot interactive scenarios such as personal robots in private and public spaces, work place training, education, and combat. The project takes an interdisciplinary approach, which will address fields such as cognitive science, communication, and music, while leading to progress in both science and engineering.Prosodic features such as pitch, loudness, tempo, timbre, and rhythm bear strong resemblance to musical features, which can inform a novel approach for generative emotion-driven robotic prosody. The first phase of this project will focus on developing machine learning techniques to derive features from a newly created emotionally labeled musical dataset. It will use these features to drive a non-linguistic robotic voice synthesizer that conveys emotional content and builds trust. The results of this study will be integrated with previous work on conveying robotic emotions through physical gestures. The second phase of the project will focus on user experiments that will study subjects' preference to a variety of robotic emotional responses when interacting with a single robot. It will use the learned features to design a larger scale robotic emotional contagion engine in an effort to improve and enrich emotion-driven human interaction with large groups of robots.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.