Applications for emotional robots

In social interaction between humans, expressing, recognizing, and understanding emotions is essential [10]. In human interaction, emotions can influence both motivation and conversational content [7]. It is assumed that this is also true for human-robot interaction because social signals (like emotional expressions) produced by robots are processed in a similar manner as signals which are produced by humans. Therefore, artificial emotions are used in human-robot interaction (HRI) for several purposes. First of all, artificial emotions allow a robot to react in a more believable and natural manner [4]. Furthermore, artificial emotions can serve as a control mechanism [3] or can also be useful by providing feedback to the user about the robots´ internal states or goals [2].