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Your Robot Will Feel You Now: Empathy in Robots and Embodied Agents

Angelica Lim, Ö. Nilay Yalçin

Abstract

The fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have long studied how empathy could be implemented in machines. One of the major drivers has been the goal of giving multimodal social and emotional intelligence to these artificially intelligent agents, which interact with people through facial expressions, body, gesture, and speech. What empathic behaviors and models have these fields implemented by mimicking human and animal behavior? In what ways have they explored creating machine-specific analogies? This chapter aims to review the knowledge from these studies, towards applying the lessons learned to today's ubiquitous, language-based agents such as ChatGPT.

Your Robot Will Feel You Now: Empathy in Robots and Embodied Agents

Abstract

The fields of human-robot interaction (HRI) and embodied conversational agents (ECAs) have long studied how empathy could be implemented in machines. One of the major drivers has been the goal of giving multimodal social and emotional intelligence to these artificially intelligent agents, which interact with people through facial expressions, body, gesture, and speech. What empathic behaviors and models have these fields implemented by mimicking human and animal behavior? In what ways have they explored creating machine-specific analogies? This chapter aims to review the knowledge from these studies, towards applying the lessons learned to today's ubiquitous, language-based agents such as ChatGPT.
Paper Structure (6 sections, 1 figure)

This paper contains 6 sections, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. Embodied Empathic Agents
  2. Models of Computational Empathy
  3. Current Challenges
  4. Can Embodied agents truly understand, feel or care?
  5. Essential features of embodied empathy
  6. Should we develop authentically empathetic robots?

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: An example of empathic agent architecture that incorporates a top-down approach to modeling low-level (affective) and high-level (cognitive) empathy.