Emotional gait generation method based on emotion mental model - Preliminary experiment with happiness and sadness

Designing humanoid robots able to interact socially with humans is a challenging task. If we want the robots to be actively integrated in our society, several issues have to be taken in account: the look of the robot, the naturalness of its movements, the stability of its walk, the reactivity it might have with its human partners. We propose to improve the reactivity of the robot by using a emotional mental model in order to generate emotional gait patterns. Those patterns will help the understanding of any emotional message conveyed between a human and a robot. We propose a novel emotional gait generation method based on the Emotion mental model. We did preliminary experiments with the Happiness and Sadness emotions and with different intensities.