Towards an Autonomous Theatrical Robot

Theatre, movies, and TV series captivate people because they show interesting stories. The success of these stories does not depend exclusively on their script, but also on the realism that actors incorporate in their performance. This realism means that actors must reflect everyday human-human interactions. However, theatre demands something that movies and TV series do not, that is the live production of believable human-human interaction. Theatre actors do not have second chances to recover problems in their performance with the same audience. They have to project emotions to the whole audience to make them believe in the played character and to engage them in the play: this same principle is used in effective social relations played in the real world. The aim of the project introduced in this paper is to implement a theatrical robot actor that can perform on the stage with human actors, generating the appropriate emotional expressions and social behavior, and solving autonomously eventual problems that could rise in the representation. Moreover, it should have a simple interface to enable untrained people, such as a director, to give it basic instructions that it can interpret to effectively play its role in the piece. Theatrical robots developed so far could mainly be used as props in theatre, and do not exploit theatre's constrains, nor could express emotions automatically generated from text and directions. The development of a theatrical actor is a first step towards the implementation of effective autonomous robots able to socially interact with people, the system and platform could be extended to other areas where showing emotions is important, as in robot games and assistive robots.