Job

Problem Statement: Inducing Emotional Empathy with Behavior, Narrative, and Minimal Actuation.

Central Questions:

Audiences perceive character and life when inanimate objects projected a sense of feeling and emotions. Emotions are perceived through behavior, reactions and expressions. Normal Complex,(high degree of freedom), robots are assumed to have a greater level of expressive capability hence facial expressions or humanoid-like gestures. But can a solid range of emotions (5+) be expressed from a simple, (less than 3 degree of freedom) machine, if given the proper environments, robot design, and interactions?

As our class defines a robot as a “surprisingly animated machine”, the animation of the machine must take certain tones. For a compelling robotics narrative,  emotions and a human-like quality  must be expressed. Although still argued, psychologists boil the basic human emotions into categories of: Fear, Anger, Sadness, Joy, Disgust, Wonder and Desire. The proposed performance goal is generate a simple yet expressive machine that can project 5 of these emotions.

Creative Constraint:

The system will consist of 4 or less methods of actuations, excluding lights and sounds.The system will be switched to enact different emotional autonomous/behavioral modes. System only needs to express 5 distinct emotions.

 

Limitations of Scope:

Since this system is focus on generating a variety of expressions via a minimalist platform, the environment, props, interactions, and robot mechanical design must be leveraged. Thus there is no actuation constraint on these members.

 

Measures of Success:

The primary measures are qualitative:

  1. Are each of the emotional states distinct within a 70% confidence.
  2. Does the audience perceive a relatable character or personality from these behaviors.
  3. Is there a sense of emotion empathy towards the robot?

 

The technical measures and milestones:

  1. Do the behavioral modes distinctly switch reliably?
  2. Is the system performing on time?
  3. Does the audience sigh, smile, or empathize with the simulated emotions?

 

Further ideas:

Simulating The 5 Stages of Grief and Loss:

         Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

Embody failure, the repeated attempting of a task, but failing like a child.