Emotion Generation and Transition of Companion Robots Based on Plutchik’s Model and Quantum Circuit Schemes

Loneliness and isolation are on the rise worldwide, threatening human well-being and the wellness of different age groups and backgrounds. Notably, global social distancing measures during the COVID-19 crisis have exacerbated this problem, resulting in various psychological and physiological ailments. Within both the categories of social and medical robots, companion robots are capable of engaging emotionally with users and providing continuous monitoring and assessment of their health. In this study, we propose a framework for modeling the emotion space of companion robots to facilitate their emotion generation and transition based on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions and reversible quantum circuit schemes. Superposition encodings allow fewer computing resources for the generation and storage of emotional states, and by using unitary operations, they facilitate easier emotion transition and recovery over different intervals. Further, an encryption strategy is designed based on the emotion communication architecture to secure the emotion-related data in human-robot interaction. It is hoped that such an integrative framework and research agenda exploring the role of companion robots will be useful to care for users’ social health by mitigating their negative emotions, especially during difficult times.

Construction and Analysis of Emotion Computing Model Based on LSTM

The electroencephalogram (EEG) is the most common method used to study emotions and capture electrical brain activity changes. Long short-term memory (LSTM) processes the temporal characteristics of data and is mostly used for emotional text and speech recognition. Since an EEG involves a time series signal, this article mainly studied the introduction of LSTM for emotional EEG recognition. First, an ALL-LSTM model with a four-layered LSTM network was established in which the average accuracy rate for emotional classification reached 86.48%. Second, four EEG characteristics were extracted via the wavelet transform (WT) using the LSTM-based sentiment classification network. The experimental results showed that the best average classification accuracy of these four features was 73.48%. This was 13% lower than in the ALL-LSTM model, indicating that inappropriate feature extraction methods could destroy the timing of EEG signals. LSTM can be used to thoroughly examine EEG signal timing and preprocessed EEG data. The accuracy and stability of the ALL-LSTM model are significantly superior to those of the WT-LSTM model. The result showed that the process of emotion generation based on EEG is sequential. Compared with EEG emotion extraction using WT, the raw EEG signal’s timing is more suitable for the LSTM network.

Multi-Disciplinary Paths to Actor-Centric Non-Player Character Emotion Models

Video game non-player characters (NPCs) are a type of agent that often inherits emotion models and functions from ancestor virtual agents. Few emotion models have been designed for NPCs explicitly, and therefore do not approach the expressive possibilities available to live-action performing actors nor hand-crafted animated characters. With distinct perspectives on emotion generation from multiple fields within narratology and computational cognitive psychology, the architecture of NPC emotion systems can reflect the theories and practices of performing artists. This chapter argues that the deployment of virtual agent emotion models applied to NPCs can constrain the performative aesthetic properties of NPCs. An actor-centric emotion model can accommodate creative processes for actors and may reveal what features emotion model architectures should have that are most useful for contemporary game production of photorealistic NPCs that achieve cinematic acting styles and robust narrative design.

Emotional Models

Emotion modeling has gained attention for almost two decades now due to the rapid growth of affective computing (AC). AC aims to detect and respond to the end-user's emotions by devices and computers. Despite the hard efforts being directed to emotion modeling with numerous tries to build different models of emotions, emotion modeling remains an art with a lack of consistency and clarity regarding the exact meaning of emotion modeling. This review deconstructs the vagueness of the term ‘emotion modeling' by discussing the various types and categories of emotion modeling, including computational models and its categories—emotion generation and emotion effects—and emotion representation models and its categories—categorical, dimensional, and componential models. This review deals with applications associated with each type of emotion model including artificial intelligence and robotics architecture, computer-human interaction applications of the computational models, and emotion classification and affect-aware applications such as video games and tutoring systems applications of emotion representation models.