Why You Want Your Drone to Have Emotions

There's been a lot of research on how humans interact with robots. In fact, there's a whole field for it called HRI (Human-Robot Interaction), with its own flagship conference (that IEEE co-sponsors) going on right now in New Zealand. The majority of the research in this field focuses on how humans interact with social robots, including home robots, commercial robots, and educational robots and toys, but odds are, if you personally own a robot, it's going to be either a vacuum or a drone. As drones have become more and more pervasive over the last few years, HRI research on them has been expanding. The latest contribution to this area is a fascinating paper being presented at the HRI conference on "Emotion Encoding in Human-Drone Interaction."