Enriching robot's actions with affective movements

Emotions are considered by many researchers as beneficial elements in social robotics, since they can enrich human-robot interaction. Although there have been works that have studied emotion expression in robots, mechanisms to express emotion are usually highly integrated with the rest of the system. This limits the possibility to use these approaches in other applications. This paper presents a system that has been initially created to facilitate the study of emotion projection, but it has been designed to enable its adaptation in other fields. The emotional enrichment system has been envisioned to be used with any action decision system. A description of the system components and their characteristics are provided. The system has been adapted to two different platforms with different degrees of freedom: Keepon and Triskarino.