Development of an experimental platform for the use in the study of empathy between human and robots

Abstract

Interactions between human and robots are being more frequent as their role is constantly expanding because of the latest technologies. For these interactions to be as smooth as possible and integrate them on everyday life, a bond between human and robot should be formed. To see this, human and robot empathy should be studied in detail from different perspectives. This work is centered around the objective of developing an experimental platform that could help the study of empathy between human and robot by giving them a challenge to solve together, the selected one was a maze. Apart from the structure for the maze to be solved, this tool will collect and provide data of different aspects of the test, like emotion of the human in each moment or the number of times that robot and human clash in its decisions. After doing the evaluation, while this platform still has limitations and a lot of room of improvement, it could be used as a steppingstone to the study of empathy in challenging situations between human and robots. This is possible due to the freedom on setting different parameters of the challenge, such as maze size or behavior of the robot on negotiations which enables the study of the bond in different situations.