Virtual KANSEI for Robots in Welfare

This paper describes a series of studies to develop various components to invest robots in welfare field (we call care-taker support robots) with human-like emotions. These components are collectively proposed as the "Virtual KANSEI (VK)," which is a capability to generate and express emotion like behaviors of this robot. The word \´KANSEI\´ is used here to mean emotions, feelings and affective behaviors. The VK consists of three parts: a KANSEI Detector, a KANSEI Generator and a KANSEI Expressive Regulator. Our care-taker support robot is expected to be able to perform smooth interaction with human in executing everyday tasks when those three functions are integrated onto it. This paper focuses on describing the concept of this VK.