Developing a Robot’s Empathetic Reactive Response Inspired by a Bottom-Up Attention Model

This paper describes the development of a reactive behavioral response framework for the tabletop robot Haru. The framework enables the robot to react to external stimuli through a repertoire of expressive routines. The behavioral response framework is inspired by the simple reactive behaviors of organisms (e.g. reflexes) based on a bottom-up attention model. First, a participatory study for behavior elicitation was conducted. We explored the possible expressive behaviors of the robot and the possible stimuli trigger. These stimuli-response (S-R) pairs are designed befitting the robot’s characteristics. Then, we developed a perception and a reactive behavior module that automatically translates any perceived stimulus into expressive behavioral responses. We evaluated the proposed S-R framework using Haru in an interaction setting and our results show an increase in human attention activity indicative of its positive impact to conveying the robot’s sense of agency.